Instant messaging is becoming one of the morepopular passtimes of the internet and ICQ is by way the largest system available.

There are nearly 100 million people to choose fromso you will certainly find someone to chat to.

Getting started is no mean feat, the download is roughly 10 megabytes which is not to be sniffed at over a dial up connection but once it has been downloaded and set up, you'll have a very powerful tool to hand.

Not only does it deal with messaging, it also does emails, pagers, SMS text messaging and real time chat. For the beginner this can be very bewildering, there are features which can hide most of the functionality until you are ready to use it.

Because this is so popular, there will be the odd wierdo, porn message or marketing scam, but these can be reduced by setting the options.

The best way of using ICQ is by going to the white pages and searching for people from a certain location, you'll usually find people to talk to there and you;ll build up a long list of contacts.

If you want the most popular messenger then download ICQ, WIndows XP may come with its own messenger but at the end of the day, 100 million users is an awful lot.