The Lonesome Road

I am a long time user of Gaim now, and I think it’s a really good multi-messenger. This is the second multi-IM client that I used. The first one I tried was Trillian (free). It’s a good client with a lot of features. The problem is that it’s very system heavy. It’s has a large footprint and is a little sluggish on the response.

So I switched to Gaim, and it made my life so much easier. It interfaces perfectly with Gtalk, MSN and Yahoo allowing me to use one program to talk to people instead of using three. Today, I had to install two of the “standard” IM clients cos for all it’s good qualities, Gaim does not support webcam chats. Kind of unfortunate, but I guess that’s the price you pay.

In any case, I started off with MSN messenger [15.3 Mb]. To be honest, I liked the old versions a lot more. The new MSN messenger has a lot more of the vista look, more eye candy and a lot of sluggishness to it’s credit. It took nearly five seconds to come from the taskbar minimization to a restored state. Also, the webcam connection did not take place inspite of repeated tries.

Yahoo messenger [11 - 15 Mb] was what was tried next. This immediately got negative marks as it installed the yahoo toolbar in Firefox - though it did uninstall with a single click. This messenger is definitely lighter than MSN and the webcam and phone call features worked perfectly.

Here’s the thing. Gaim is all of 6.5 Mb and does almost everything that the other two can do. it’s much lighter on system resources and is open source. Here’s another fun thing. My yahoo account was one of the addresses which was affected by the worm attack on the yahoo servers. Thus, I had to create a new address. I was bothered about the fact that my entire contact list was gone. Today, while exploring the Gaim menus, I turned on the “Show offline buddies” option. Here’s where it get good. Every one of my contacts from my old email address were present in the list, albeit with a “Not on server” message. Adding them back into my list was a simple matter of right-clicking on them and saying “Add as buddy”. I could never have done that (and believe me, I tried) with the normal messenger.

So, eschew the eye candy and the memory hogging. Try Gaim - you just might like it

Later!