ICQ, AOL, MSN, YAHOO (the big 4) are some of the bigger names in P2P chat. What do they have in common, they all work with IMICI without all the clutter, advertisments and long load up times. Yep, this is an ’’all in one program’’ that does not include the bells and whistles like the big four have, but let you chat instantly and know if friends are online. You can’t (last I checked anyway) transfer files like ICQ, but you can chat with your buddies and that is all I care about. It does not have the random people chat feature like ICQ (IMO it is just a weirdo finder anyway). My wife and her sister use it to chat on AOL, I can tell if my brother is on ICQ and if my buddys are on MSN all at the same time, and do it without killing my internet connection with downloading advertisments and huge annoying startup splashscreens. No spam messages seem to go through this program also for some reason. No unwanted random rated XXX messages ever. No ten thousand different settings to tweek, it is very simple and uncomplicated.

There is no fancy text options (smiley faces), there is nothing but the bare essentials of chat. If you want fancy, stick with the big boys and put up with their in your face advertisments.

Now for some catches, you still have to download and set up an account for each of the big four if you want to use them, you can not set up accounts on IMICI, but once you have set up those accounts, you don’t have to open them again unless you want to. Just use IMICI and cut out the clutter and wasted bandwidth/CPU for your computer. Great for dialup internet connections like mine.

Gee, now you don’t have to decide which one to open to see if your friends are online, just open IMICI and you cover all bases at once.

Do a search for ’’IMICI’’ on www.google.com and you will find it.

Did I mention it was Free (it least is was when I downloaded it a year ago). I use version 2.1.2-1 (look for it on google if they want to charge you money now, the older version is free and I don’t know about the newer versions).

Software version:

Version 2.1.2-1