One of the more popular open source IM clients is Pidgin (formerly GAIM). This client works with pretty much all chat services including the majors MSN, Google Talk, AIM, and Yahoo! Pidgin works with Linux, Windows, BSD, and other Unix distributions. If you’re a real minimalist you can even get a text based version. It is very customizable and there is a lot of open source plug ins for it as well. Pidgin supports pictures, emoticons, and fonts. Very customizable IM alternative!
Choose your favorite chat service.
Here is an example of the menu choices available.
You can resize your messaging window to your liking.
Get more information and download Pidgin.
NOTE: You shouldn’t disable your page file unless you really really know what you are doing.
Normally we try and focus on articles about how to customize your computer, but today we’ll take a break from that and do a book review. This is something I’ve not done before, so any suggestions or questions will be welcomed in the comments.
If you want to test an explorer shell plugin or registry hack without having to log off, more technical users will usually just kill the explorer.exe process in Task Manager. Windows Vista has another way to do the same thing that you might not be aware of.
If you are a Microsoft Outlook user that regularly uses iGoogle as your dashboard, have you ever thought about combining the two? It’s nearly trivial to add your iGoogle page to Outlook and make it the startup page.
If you like the look and feel of Vista but don’t want to deal with the headache of swapping Operating Systems, Vista Inspirat from the folks at Crystal XP might be worth considering. Unlike an application such as Window Blinds … Vista Inspirat is completely free (although they do encourage
If you are the type of person that never uses any applications in the system tray, you might be interested in this registry hack to turn it off entirely. I can’t imagine using my own system this way, but we’re all about providing information.
In the never-ending quest to rid your computer of unnecessary bloat, Windows Vista has a lot less options than prior versions, but you can still get rid of some of the extra Windows components that you don’t need.
Do you ever find it frustrating that you can’t make changes to the auto-complete entries in Microsoft Outlook? Even more annoying is the fact that items in your address book aren’t immediately added to the autocomplete list.
If you have multiple users on your network domain and want to give a user administrator rights you need to add them to the Admin user group. The process is relatively simple, here is how.
The vast majority of people I know use a software like Nero to handle all their CD/DVD burning even though Windows Vista has built-in support for burning. So how do you get rid of the built-in Windows Vista burning features since you don’t need them?
