TRILLIAN TO ONE (Trillian)

Member Name: alflavor

Product:	Trillian
Date:	09/04/02 (980 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: One program does all, small memory take-up, essentially free

Disadvantages: AOL blocks use now and then

Trillian is, in essence, one of the finest and most useful pieces of freeware currently in existence, in my opinion. Trillian has been designed to allow the fan of Instant Messaging programs such as ICQ, AOL messenger, MSN messenger, Yahoo! and even the IRC chat networks to connect to any one or all of these at once. In short - a multi-network chat client!

For the past three years I have always used ICQ, and thus encouraged anyone new online that I knew to go with ICQ also. I even managed to persuade the odd person to use ICQ even though they were already set up with MSN IM!

The problems of running more than one of these IM programs at once are that unless your PC is loaded with well over 128mb of RAM then you are likely to be slowing your PC down significantly whilst running it. Even something like ICQ on its own can be rather clunky, although it has slimmed down of late.

By downloading Trillian from www.trillian.cc you can now connect to any one or all of these chat networks, and communicate fully between ALL your friends! As long as you have an account with whichever network you want to use then you're ok. For instance with MSN if you have a hotmail address, then this is all you need!

The file size for the Trillian download is just 2.2mb so this'll not take too long to download, and is indeed smaller than your average MP3 file. Also it is actually 1mb smaller in size than the 2002 version of ICQ! The software is designed to run on all examples of Windows i.e. 95, 98, Me, NT, 2000 and XP.

Trillian installs painlessly and quickly, and does set itself to auto-run at start-up. Personally I don't like many things to run at start-up, so I go into msconfig mode (get in touch if you need to know how!) and remove the program from the start-up list. The Trillian icon is placed on your desktop, and is two blue-green globes connected together. On the first run of the software you need to do a little configuration.
Essentially the program will import your existing IM programs contacts, it will know where they will be on you PC, unless you have hidden them somewhere!

For any programs you don't currently run, then obviously you don't need to copy any contacts over, although you can do so in the future if you need to use a new IM system.

When you're up and running you can immediately see all your contacts on the different networks, and they're easily donated by the standard icons, such as the flower for ICQ, and the Y of the Yahoo! System. Following on from this you can then see who?s connected and who's not. Simple.

To add a future user is easy, and involves the addition symbol at the top of the Trillian main window. Other features include the away messages. You can set different away messages for each program, you can disconnect from just one program if you like, and at the click of a mouse it's possible to globally disconnect or reconnect to all the different networks!

The whole operation of chatting needs no explanation I feel, suffice to say the window that you chat in is very flexible, in nice shades of blue and with a whole host of text and icon possibilities.

Problems. Whilst I have no issues at all with the program in itself, I have had a couple of problems, only small, but I should point these out to you. Sounds have been a problem, and it was only after visiting the technical forums at Trillian that I was able to solve this. Oddly the sounds aren't enabled upon installation, and you have to go deep into the advanced properties of Trillian and add sounds for each individual operation! Luckily this wasn't too stressful, as I just wanted a sound when a message came in to me!

The 2nd problem relates to something I've not touched upon yet, and they are skins. From the producer's website are a whole host of skins that can change the complete look and feel of Trillian and some
of them do look really cool. The only problem is they don't tell you what to do with them. Again, by digging around in the technical forums I have found some pointers as to what to do with my downloaded skin file, but I cannot get it be recognised from the skin selector menu from within the program!

Overall, this is a quality piece of freeware and does come highly recommended by myself, for being a most innovative and complete package. Currently only AOL seem to be doing things to try and block Trillian users i.e. by only allowing folk using the proprietary AOL software to log on, however Trillian fight back with a fix each and every time. In fact AOL seem to have stopped blocking Trillian users, as the fixes have stopped for a while.

All the other networks do not seem to have any issues with the software, otherwise they would have implemented blocks. In any case I think the other networks can learn a lot from Trillian!

Whilst being freeware, the writer's do request donations, but it is not shareware as such. I anticipate future versions may go the full shareware route.

As I say, certainly recommended, if you chat on more than one IM platform, and also you find any other IM program to be clunky and intrusive.

Alflavor.

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