Too many chat clients? Maybe its time you started Pidgin'in

How many of you have got more than one chat client installed on your computer? Well as for me, I have got yahoo,gtalk,windows live installed on mine. The reason for this is because I have friends that are not all on one network. And I guess I cant blame them because there is no ONE network that everyone likes. Windows Live is good but then so is Yahoo Messanger. Google Talk is the new kid on the block but then it is not to be taken lightly. Keeping track of multiple chat clients can be a task, and one needs to free as much time administering stuff, and should instead use that time surfing the web or doing other productive tasks :)

Also, I am all about trying to lower my RAM and CPU usage, and having 3 clients, each adding about 50M of RAM footprint doesnt quite seem right to me. So I started looking around for chat clients that would handle multiple networks. There are quite a few out there but I settled on Pidgin. Its quite a nifty software and it supports all the three networks that I currently have single clients to (I also checked out trillian, but that doesnt support Google Talk :( ). Now, all I have is one client that doesnt use more than 40MB of RAM.

There is one gripe with this client (actually it is with all the other single chat clients as well). I still havent been able to bind a timezone to my chat buddies. This will be handy since then you would know what their local time is instead of having to ask them.. dont you think that would be a cool addition?

Anyways, you can try pidigin out for yourself. Click here to download yourself a copy.

Multiple homepages in Internet Explorer

Gone are the days when Internet was a simple tool meant for the rich and popular. Nowadays, it has become as important a utility as anything. If you don't believe me, just skip using anything to do with internet for a day (and yes that means emails, twitter, webpages and anything of the like). We are expecting a lot from internet nowadays, from news to bank access.

I cant speak for others but I want multiple homepages open when I start up my browser. And yes I do use Internet Explorer hehe. Well I still cant make up my mind as to which browser to use. I like Firefox but it is too memory intensive and Internet Explorer is not too bad, except for the security issues, so am running it in a sandbox. Safari is good but not as elegant as Firefox and Opera is too bloated for simple things.

Anyways, if you would like to open multiple homepages in Internet Explorer 7+, do the following

1. Click the Tools Menu
2. Click Internet Options
3. Click the General Tab
4. Type in or paste an URL that you want to use as your home page in the Home Page section.
5. Hit ENTER and type in another URL
6. Repeat until you have all the ones you want
7. Click OK
8. Close and Restart your browser to see them all open.

For a full discussion on this go to http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/1171/ie7-start-up-with-multiple-home-page-tabs-open-in-internet-explorer-7/