Windows Dead Messenger

My wife and I met on the internet. We lived in the same town, but did not know of one another. I saw her on a match up website, answered her ad. She replied and we emailed. Then IM, then telephone. Much of our early relationship could be traced to MSN messenger. I worked third shift as a computer operator, and she would often sit up and we would talk while I worked. It would have been long distance over the phone, but thanks to messenger we could talk a lot. Of course we had to type, but still.

Anyway, messenger has evolved and added many features since those olden days. Now I remember from my sales days, one of the methods of selling is called features and benefits. Basically you tell a customer one of your features, then explain what benefits that would give your customer. Well if you've been living under a rock until recently, an instant messenger is a program that connects your computer to a network service. You have an indentification with the service provider. When you log your computer into that network service, the service notifies everyone that has your identifier listed as a contact that you are online. It also tells you which of your contacts are currently signed in with the service. You can then instantly contact any of those people.

You can also use the messenger to transfer files to a contact. Some firewalls may balk at this though. This feature is probably the single most hated feature as far as corporate IT guys are concerned. This has proven an excellent virus spreading feature. On the other had, if you want to send multiple files, or larger files, it beats the heck out of email. I've transferred reports to coworkers, pictures to family and mp3's to friends this way.

Another feature that people like is the voice call, where you can use microphones to actually talk. You can also transmit webcams to whoever you are talking to. Now you can keep as many typing conversations going as you can keep straight, but you can only voice talk to one contact at a time. You can also only view and transmit one web cam at a time. Otherwise Netmeeting might be in danger.

Microsoft's latest version of messenger is called Windows Live Messenger. It has all the basic features plus a lot of cute new stuff, mostly minor but nice. It is also tied into some other projects that fall under the Windows Live banner, such as Live Spaces, ect. Unfortunately it is also fairly buggy. Last Tuesday, both my and my wife's messengers went out. They didn't give any errors, just refused to connect. Our older accounts still worked fine from the computer, but the current ones would not connect. After about 3 days, I finally found a site that had a link to reset the options in the registry which fixed it like a charm. Very aggravating in a product that is fairly nice otherwise. Apparently this affect not only our 2 computers, but a great many other as well as I was about the 50th person to thank the guy for the fix.