LegionWorld members currently have chats every Tuesday, through AOL Instant Messenger, starting at about 6:30 pm ET (3:30 pm PT, 11:30 pm in Britain). We use chat room "Irulan System".

Some, though, have had trouble with the free AIM program. Its recent versions display ads, both GIFs and Flash animations, that take up a lot of computer attention and occasionally have caused crashes. Its interface is also quite cluttered. Others have had to remove AIM from office computers because of its system demands.

Gaim is a completely free, less-demanding, and easily used alternative. It's an IM, chat-room, and IRC program that's developed as "open source," being continually improved by programmers' voluntary efforts, in much the same way as Mozilla / Firefox and the OpenOffice application suite.

Gaim lets you use just one program to chat and IM using accounts you've set up with AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, ICQ, MSN, and several other popular instant-messaging services. These services now store "buddy lists" on their own servers. So you can use this program to access them as you have before.

(You can also open new accounts on the Web for any or all of these, if you don't have them, without installing or using each service's separate IM program. Links for doing so are here . You can set up a new account for AIM chats here .)

In Gaim you also can set up user names and chat in discussion "channels" on the many free Internet Relay Chat networks, such as DALnet.

You can have several "conversations" going in a single window, such as both a chat room and private one-on-one IMs. This reduces the clutter and system demands if you like to carry on several chats at once.

It's simple to set up "accounts" with the screen names or user names you've established, entering them with their passwords, and letting Gaim make one or more of the connections for you. No ads are loaded or displayed, and the features you're used to still operate for handling "buddy lists" and customizing messages. Chats can be logged simply and easily, and automatically if you choose.

IMs and chats work flawlessly, along with buddy icons and storing of buddy information. A few aspects aren't perfect, such as the AIM file-transfer service, used while in IMs or chats. (But that's often due to AOL's servers being slow or flaky, and it doesn't always work for those using the AIM program, either. Any large file is more easily sent attached to e-mail, anyway.)

Still, this is a far better free IM-and-chat "client" than AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, and even the shareware mIRC, and you won't need to run three or more separate programs any more.

You can get much more information, and download the current (1.4.0) version of Gaim, at this Website . It's available for Windows and for several versions of Linux and Unix. The full initial version is about a 6 MB download (update versions can be smaller). It installs cleanly and with a minimum of entries in your system Registry.

Take a good look at this excellent chat program!

Thanks Grey!

I'm going to use this for next Tuesday's chat.

Assuming I haven't gone postal with my work load on Tuesday (currently only five 1 hour meetings planned) I'll give it a try as well.

So does this mean we're not going to be using AIM anymore for chats? Or is this an optional program to use to enter the AIM chat?

how do i join the chats on tuesday?

What DB said!

Well, when we chat in AIM, all you have to do is invite yourself to chat, using Irulan System as the chatroom name. Otherwise, someone in the chatroom would have to invite you to it.

GAIM uses your AIM ids and passwords. Grey was using it to access last Tuesday's chat, so I assume it's just like AIM, but without the ads, etc.

Alright, I got it loaded and logged in. Took a few times of trying both my AIM and Yahoo IDs, though, before it finally accepted both.

Assuming I'm home in time on Tuesday I'll try to use it to join in the chat.

what time is the show down? time zone too?

Tuesday nights. we usually start showing up between 6:30-7:00 PM EST. chat usually goes on for a couple of hours, with people coming and going at schedules allow

You can certainly stick with AIM's own software. (Using v5.5 or earlier is probably better, though, as AOL keeps adding "adware" to it with each new version.)

Gaim is just another way to access the AIM or other chat accounts you've set up. Web links to set accounts up without having to install the AIM, etc., programs are at the Gaim FAQ page. You can set up a new AIM account here .

Gaim does leave out the ads, which I doubt many will miss. It also focuses on instant messaging, which has it omit support for some of the more elaborate AIM features, such as audio and video chats.

If you want a commercial package that handles several such IM routes in a similar way, you can also try the recently improved Trillian . It has a versatile free version and, with its paid version, allows for audio and video chats.

Since it's not open-source, Trillian is updated less frequently and has taken longer to shake its own bugs. But it's another worthwhile choice ... and still works better than AIM's own software.