Like most people my age I have had some dealings with Instant Messengers (IM’s). I started off Using Yahoo back in college and uni. Their web messenger was always nice and simple, and I have to admit I didn’t mind some of the chat rooms on there. After I left uni, I started using MSN messenger. Some of my friends from uni where on it and as we were spread out over the country it was a good way to keep in touch (I couldn’t convince them to use yahoo as they kind of believed that Microsoft were ok).

I have to admit to not being a big fan at first. I didn’t like the interface and found it quite messy and I preferred the emoticons on yahoo. Ok mostly it was probably the shock of using something other than yahoo, and as I used it more I did get use to it. Heck I even began to enjoy using it even, and I liked that I could even create my own emoticons. But from the first I always found little things that could annoy me. Like the flash adverts at the bottom, yeah yahoo has them too but on MSN not only are they animated but they also get bigger if your mouse happens to roll over them, and then don’t seem to close down as soon as you move away.

Then they started introducing tabs so that you could go look at different things while chatting, erm isn’t that what my web browser is for? Why would I want to look at a narrow screen when I have a nice flat screen monitor with good resolution. Besides a browser renders it so much better. Speaking of browsers, why does MSN (or Windows Live Messenger as they now call it) decide that I have to use IE to look at my emails? I use Firefox as my default browser, I don’t like IE at all, yet when I click on the mail icon in MSN I am suddenly presented with IE loading!

Speaking of loading, whats with the loading time for MSN. Actually no, not the loading time, it doesn’t take all that long for it to load, its the log in time thats horrible. Enter your username and password, click enter and then go make a cp of tea while you wait for it to load up your contacts list. Even once you have that it’s not finished, you have to wait for the Windows Live Today screen or what ever its called cause it eats system resources. I mean, I have a decent spec machine running 2 GB of ram and it still makes it run slow until that thing is loaded.

Oh and one last thing, why doesn’t double clicking the top left hand corner close the screen. In every other Windows program, you double click there and the screen closes, no in Windows Live Messenger though, oh no suddenly it doesn’t do anything, or it makes it full screen. If’s daft, and it’s not like they can say its a window’s Vista idea because I have Vista and nothing else does that.

Other than those few problems I think it’s truly wonderful piece of software and there’s nothing to beat it on the market, oh wait yes there is…….. Pidgin

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