Wednesday, December 14, 2005

Spot the messenger

I absolutely hate MSN messenger, and I use it only because of friends and office colleagues. I am just waiting for the day when msn and yahoo collaboration is complete so that I wouldn't have to use the stupid msn messenger.
Why do I hate it so much? As an example, today when I booted my PC, I saw this:

But I hadn't launched the messenger yet. How come I got logged on to msn without my knowing? Clicking on the popup, I got:


Trying spotting the messenger now in the taskbar/system tray. There is no icon of messenger. I didn't launch it. But still I am logged onto msn, the chat window is open. Knowing the looks (and checking the version), I know its Windows Messenger 4.7 that comes pre-installed with XP. The question is, first, why doesn't this Windows Messenger gets uninstalled when I installed MSN messenger 7.0? Why does MS windows keeps 2 copies of the same program. Second, if it will not uninstall automatically, why its there a manual way of uninstalling it. I have tried using "Add/Remove Windows Component" and what not, but the fact is, it will not uninstall itself, it will log you on without your knowing as soon as you get connected to internet thereby wasting your bandwidth and invading your privacy, and it will make you and your PC susceptible to chat and advertisement attacks.

This is the exact reason why I hate it (and why I haven't upgraded to msn messenger 7.5). So I found this great tool to remove Windows Messenger (though it still have msn messenger 7.0 installed due to friends/colleagues) .

BTW, http://messenger.msn.com doesn't work on firefox due to poor conformity to web standards.

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