Gaim

[Yeahman]

I was looking through how much memory the programs I run require and I was pretty shocked when it came to AIM. 23MB of RAM and 14MB of virtual memory! So I tried out Trillian which looked like it had a memory leak. And I tried Gaim. I use it with Linux but earlier versions for Windows were just too ugly. But I'm now happily using Gaim on Windows. It's simple, ads or useless toolbars, and it has tabbed messaging. It uses memory usage is in the single digits. My favorite feature is the name aliasing. You can assign names to the screen names. If you ever had the experience of forgeting who that person on your buddy list was, this feature would come in handy. And it's not saved locally. So whereever you go, if you use Gaim your aliases will be retained.
Oh and it can be used with AIM, ICQ, IRC, MSN, Yahoo, and some others.

The negative...
Like older versions of AIM, you can't share from behind a router unless you configure your router to direct that port to you. That means that only 1 person from behind a router can use the direct connect feature.
If you can deal with that, I don't see a reason why you shouldn't switch to Gaim.

gaim.sourceforge.net

[truMp]

let me try.

[SunWuKong]

i love Gaim and i use it.
go open source! :smile:

[Yeahman]

Oh yeah, and when installing, select a theme. No theme is ugly. I used the Windows emulating theme which makes it look pretty much like AIM. Haven't tried the other themes.

[FrankieY18]

hard to manage when you have too many people in your buddy list..

[moJo]

So I tried out Trillian which looked like it had a memory leak.
can you explain what that means? i use trillian.

[hooligan]

can you explain what that means? i use trillian.

Er, I don't know if I'm explaining this right, but in layman's terms the ram (paging memory) that should be recycled isn't? And it drains your system resources and eventually lags your computer down if you leave it on long enough.

[sinisterpanda]

i've been using gaim since version .3 or something like that! I love every minute

[Yeahman]

hard to manage when you have too many people in your buddy list..
Are you talking about gaim? I have about 200 people on my bl. There are more sorting orders and hiding options and name aliasing in gaim. Helps a lot especially if you have a large bl.

can you explain what that means? i use trillian.
I was using the latest free version. I was comparing the memory usage of different IM software and I noticed that Trillian had a memory leak. Its memory usage kept on increasing until I was forced to close it. I read somewhere that it happens if you have just 1 AIM account open or something like that.

BTW, using the windows emulator theme, I often forget that I'm using Gaim. I looks almost exactly like AIM minus the ads.

[sOKaLiBoY]

i might have to give this a try. even though i don't have to worry about memory usage. 1gb dual channel memory with my Athlon 64 overclocked to 2.5GHz. Love my pc. All built my me of course

[stupidredhead13]

ah yay, i just downloaded Gaim because of the logging of conversations. and i was pleasantly suprised at how little memory it uses

[ahsingjai]

Or................

http://aftermath.dyndns.org:8888/%7Eaimadhack/?tprq=website

AIM Ad hack...

[Atealtha]

Last time I used Gaim, it wouldn't render smaller size fonts well and I always asked them to make their font bigger.

Also when I was using two screen names, where I had a screen name on both lists, would show up twice. One is to message the person with one screen name, and the other entry is to message the person with the second.

[robotic]

can everyone gain access to their aim?

mine says that there is a firewall blocking it :frown:

[Yeahman]

Last time I used Gaim, it wouldn't render smaller size fonts well and I always asked them to make their font bigger.
Font sizes are adjusted in GTK.

[bluemonq]

trillian doesn't have a memory leak. and to save memory you can shut off unused plugins. there's almost always a tradeoff between modularity and resources required (architecture and what not); it might not be a lot, but it's there.

[hooligan]

can everyone gain access to their aim?

mine says that there is a firewall blocking it :frown:

Scan, using AIM for open ports. I forgot how I did this, but I used another port and viola, it works.