Trillian

There are two applications that hang my system just to see me cry. And these two applications take up a large memory print and will act up mainly when I've gone half way through some number crunching in excel, thereby forcing me to close my existing applications, lose 2 hours of work and redo them.

The two applications are IE7/IE8 and yahoo messenger, each robbing my RAM of 72K and 52K respectively. Eliminating the first problem was easy. I don't use IE7. Its that simple. I use k-meleon (firefox engine). Nothing fancy, just decent browsing and a small 30K footprint.

The second is a bit tricky since we all use yahoo messenger for internal communication and I risk being an outlaw staying outside the boundaries of ymsngr. With all its fancy skins, themes, sounds, croaks, bells, whistles and more blah, the basic fun of chatting and communicating is lost among all those pachydermal worthless cosmetic features.

Having mopped the floor two weeks ago with my tears after losing some Form 16A data in MS Word due to ymsngr, I decided to search for a simpler application and stumbled upon Trillian (http://www.trillian-messenger.net/) which imports all your contacts from ICQ, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, MSN, and IRC. It also stores your chat histories if needed and takes up a miniscule 3.7K of RAM.

Not having had a system hang in 2 weeks (1 week actually since I was chilling out the last week), I'm going to attempt completing my Form 16As today.

I've ranted enough. If you're interested in a little more speed (especially you humans out there who do not have the new fangled 4 GB DDR3 RAM) due to a lower RAM footprint, I invite you to try Trillian. Its an 8 MB download and is worth the install.