I think it was around the time that Aaron managed to crash an XPS with the amount of instant messaging clients he was running that we decided it’d be time to do an article on running all your messaging applications under the one umbrella. Of course, being the internet Kurtz’s that we are, we went deep, found some strange and (seemingly) exciting clients along the way and wound up in all sorts of awkward and interesting random chats with women who might or might not have been women. The internet is a fun place, and ditching your default IM client is a hellova way to explore some of the weirdness, as well as claw back a few scraps of memory, time and convenience in your day.

Many users are tied to a specific IM client by their choice of email provider; worse still, there are a lot of us stuck using multiple IM applications to manage and chat to multiple contact lists from various email accounts. The fact is that juggling contacts and chat windows across two or three individual applications is not only tedious; it’s a waste of time and resources.

There are a few solutions to this kind of problem, but the easiest is to find an application that will cut down on the number of active windows you’ll have at once.