Gaim Over!

After this morning's fiasco, I'm a self-declared bona fide expert in Instant Messenger clients.

In the wake of MSN Messenger (and it's evil twin Web Messenger), Gaim had been my best alternative. I've had to reinstall Gaim on a regular basis and I'd attributed that to a very wonky computer. (I was wrong). Still, it was a good IM client handling multiple protocols, including MSN. At the witching hour of midnight today, I'd ran the program as usual, only to witness multiple crashes. Frustration abound, reinstalling the program ad hoc did nothing to alleviate the problem. Scrutinizing the Gaim forum did little to help, although in the process, I'd picked up this nugget of information - Gaim was meant to run without a hitch for 49.7 consecutive days. ThaT explained the regular reinstallation previously.

To cut the long (and painfully flummoxing) story short, Mission MSN Rampage was on. For the next three hours, hope, suspense, disappointment and annoyance had a good brew when I downloaded and ran the following:

• Trillian - Unstable connection
  
• Gaim 2.0.3 beta - Stubbornly crashed
• MyJabber - Crashed
• Adium - Meant for Macs
  
• Odigo - Had a really cute interface of a remote control. Pity its plug-in for MSN isn't ready.
  
• Instan-T - Unable to run properly
  
• Gilly Messenger - Required some software pack from Microsoft's site. (no way!)
  
• IM2 - Website didn't exist anymore

Subsequently, I found Miranda. What a pleasant surprise! It had more functions than Gaim and was a breeze to use. More importantly, it logged onto MSN instantly. Happiness! Gaim over!

Time Slept: Sleep? What sleep?