I enjoy in the evening when everything is done getting on line and chatting with people I have met on the net. There are many, many chat programs out there to chose from.
Some of them are space hogs and will take up a lot of your computers resources. If you are downloading anything make sure you check the space it will use and that you have enough free space to do that.
One of the most popular chat programs is ICQ and it is the one I have been using the longest.I first downloaded it about 7 years ago. Be sure and mark down your number and your password should you have to reformat or change computers so that you will have the same number when you have to download it again.Password retrieval on this program is not easy. I try to use the same password for everything when I can but I had to get a new number as in changing machines it would not let me in, saying my password was wrong and I may very well have typed it in wrong in the first place but they are not very helpful in getting you, your old account back. Luckily I write down my contact numbers.
Anyway ICQ has many features such as voice and sending greeting cards and many other features which I am sure most of you know about and I covered in my review of ICQ by itself.
ICQ logs all message history. After awhile that builds up and takes up a lot of space so you can gain some space back by deleting your message history. If you are on every day I would recommend deleting it every day. It still does draw a lot off your performance level so unless you have a super computer I would not advise using it at the same time you have another chat program running.
Others that are similar to ICQ but take up less space include yahoo messenger, msn messenger and AOL instant messenger. All are free downloads and you do not have to have AOL service to download their messenger.
There are others such as netmeeting, ICUII, and so on that allow for video conferencing and these are fun to see who you are talking to but again require a lot of space.
I have all these on my machine but never try to run more than one at a time.
There are literally hundreds to chose from out there so pick one that sounds right for you and give it a try. https://tucows.com has quite a few listed and is one of my favorite sites to download from. Make sure the version of the software that you download goes with your machine. It will tell you what version of windows it will run on.
I would never recommend downloading one that is in the beta testing stage as there can be many bugs in it that needs to be worked out so save yourself a headache and wait until they are done testing before downloading.
Each program listed will give you the size of the file and the download time.
Keep your computer space freed up by removing temporary files, temporary internet files, cookies and so on. It will give you plenty of space to use for other things but then that is another review in itself.
My personal favorite chat program would now be yahoo over any other. You can even get your mail there as it comes in while you are chatting. It is easy to use and although it doesn’t have as many features as ICQ it works great for me and I don’t really need the extra features and with yahoo I can do more than one thing at once.