I am a light abuser of MSN Messenger. I have maybe 15 contacts on my IM list right now and most of those folks stay on the list because they are relatively quiet, I actually talk on a weekly basis to four people. I look at IM like I look at the phone, there are some people I will talk for hours on the phone with but for the most part I don’t ever want to hear nor see the phone. With IM there are a couple of people I thoroughly enjoy chatting with and other than that, I don’t want to hear anything out of IM because it is an annoyance and interrupts me from getting stuff done.
So it is even the more frustrating when I do go to use it and it screws up. After much prodding from my most loquacious IM “buddy” I upgrade to the live messenger beta because I figure, what the heck, I will support the quasi group this person has gone to work with now. It looks pretty nice, it isn’t as nice an upgrade from 7.5 to 8 as is XP to Vista but it is still nice. I find it funny that you can hide the menu bar but can’t move the window up to the far right and actually use that new found space (the window will move down the approx size of the menu bar if it were there). I find it frustrating that Messenger has the worst habit of just losing chat histories anytime it sneezes, someone there needs to learn to write the messages to disk every 5 or 10 minutes instead of caching in memory until something happens…
Anyway Messenger isn’t as nice as the latest Trillian by at least an order of magnitude but Messenger can do two things that I absolutely need…
The first is that it will display the custom animated emoticons, I have some very funny ones (Storm Trooper Humping and stick man pouring gas over himself and lighting it) and some of my friends have some amazingly funny ones that they are supposed to share with me on a regular basis but seem to forget about until I prod them PROD PROD PROD
The second is I like the easy display of the display picture MSN has available because I very much enjoy the display pictures for some of my contacts, for instance Dean has this dorky pic that just makes me smile every time I see it. With Trillian I have to open a chat window for each person to see the image. The number of issues I have with MSN Messenger though are considerable and have sent that feedback back… Outside of the outright bugs and problems, basically I want Messenger to be as good as and feature filled and flexible as Trillian with those two additional features and because I realize MSN has to make money somehow, some small (less than 25% of the area) of the window can be Ads. That is another complaint I have with Live Messenger right now, I calculated that over 40% of the window is wasted with advertising, a label for the advertising, and two search bars that I absolutely will not use as well as some icons at the top I won’t use. I am not looking for an all inclusive do everything for me client, I just want to chat with a few people. MSFT often seems to have an issue with giving people options on what they want to see.
Oh but to go back to topic… Today I am using it and out of the blue I start getting “Message can’t be delivered to all recipients” about every 18 messages out of 20. This is a trifle annoying as I will be responding and the only things that get through are things like
MESSENGER SUCKS MY ASS!
or
*&^$^%#$$#&%#
Where it is actually something you can’t say on TV so the people I am talking to are thinking I am having seizures or off dancing the forbidden dance or something…
Worse yet, I actually had a question I needed to ask my friends today about… of all things… DNS and how Windows functionally or disfunctionally worked (that was my question actually)…
So I finally give up and fall back to email. Then I get pinged this evening from one of my friends asking about some SBS stuff and I go to respond and I get one line in and then it starts screwing up… So I jump to my Vista machine and low and behold Messenger works there… slightly older beta version… Brand new Windows machine with no Windows Rot to muck with it… Hmmmm. So I jump to an older version of MSN on another machine (my Dev Laptop which currently has admod up in the IDE) and I get right on and it works fine… So I go back to Vista and now I get the message
You cannot sign in to Messenger because you are using an old version of Messenger.
This is no more than 90 seconds after I had previously logged into it….
Sigh. I need to reload my main desktop machine, I haven’t reloaded it in over 2 years, almost 2.5 years now… That is the longest I have ever subjected myself to Windows Rot. Usually I rebuild every 4-6 months on my main desktop and every year on my Dev laptop (it has a much more stable load, I don’t screw with that machine). Though I guess being loaded with the same load for 2.5 years means I should be looking at a new machine anyway. The name of this machine (fastmofo) isn’t as applicable anymore. I need to build the successor, realfastmofo. 🙂
So time to crank up Metallica S&M and hit newegg.com.
 joe
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