Trillian
I have used instant messaging since the early days of the Internet, back in the day when AOL and ICQ were the only games in town. (Does anyone even use ICQ anymore?) Since those early days, each new product version has grown ever larger, bloated, and more complicated. Today, the programs to access these services are crammed full of features and options that hardly anyone is ever likely to use. If you use AOL or Yahoo messengers, check your system processes while it is running. You’re likely to be stunned at the amount of memory being sucked up by each of these beasts. They have ad windows, and aim to take over your system with resource-hogging, unnecessary features.
Enter Trillian. It is a free, polished, and intuitive chat program used to access virtually all of the different chat mediums from a single window. There are no advertisements or extra junk installed on your system. There is a also Pro version available for paying users that has more advanced features. I use the Basic version. I used to use this program a long time ago, and back then, it did have a few rough edges. Since that time, it has really grown up and become very slick and polished. The version I am using now is v3.1.
One thing that I like is that the program uses plug-ins for each of the chat networks. You can choose not to install ones that you don’t plan to use. Best of all, even while connected to all three chat services that I frequent (AOL, Yahoo, and MSN), the program uses approximately 14 MB of RAM. You can’t even run a single one of the native chat applications with that little memory. I’d like to add that I rarely connect to MSN because I do not like it.
If you are using any of the chat services to do video chat, or even just audio, you will probably be better off using the real native program for that. But for everything else, don’t waste your time or space installing any of the instant messaging beasts. Trillian is all you need.
As far as I know, Trillian it is for Windows only. If you use Linux, then Gaim is obviously your best bet. But if you are running Windows, you’ll find Trillian to be much more modern and polished than Gaim. At the time of this writing, Gaim version 2.0 has not been yet been finalized. It seems like it has been ages since the last release came out. Therefore, I am basing my comparison on the current version of Gaim, which is 1.50.
