... developer / gamer

I'm now a Trillian user. All of the different chat clients I was using started to get complicated and I needed a clean solution. The upcoming chat functions in Xbox Live were not going to help the whole situation either so I decided to take the plunge and purchase Trillian pro for 25 bucks. The verdict is still out as to whether or not I'm a happy customer, but I'm liking it so far.

Google Chat (Jabber) was not working until I figured out that Windows Firewall for Vista was not telling me that it was blocking some of the Jabber ports. I initially tried to force port 5222, but nothing was working. Finally, I found that I needed to restart the firewall for the port changes to take effect. This isn't the first time I've had problems with Windows Firewall as it seems they've decided to make it 'easier' for us by not telling us when it blocks something. I didn't have this problem with some of the other firewalls I've used, namely Bitdefender's.

Another tip for Trillian first timers. You might feel the need to group your contacts by what medium they are connected to. I was having some initial problems with the grouping until I found a little menu called 'hide empty groups' that kept me from seeing all of the newly created groups I made and drag and drop my contacts into them. Go to 'View' and uncheck 'hide empty groups'.