I’ve heard that Windows 7 has this funny limitation for netbooks – you can only run three applications at a time. On first glance, that is crazy restrictive (how many applications are running in your taskbar?), but if you define Application more concretely, I think it’s actually realistic.
In practice, I’ve been swapping between three things on my mini9: Firefox, Windows Explorer (although I expect this to decrease now that everything is setup) and my IM application. I’m using Miranda IM, which is similar to Pidgin in that you can use a variety of IM protocols, but with the key difference that I can fit more than 5 names on my contact list on my screen.
With my mini9, now I have 3 locations (mini9, desktop, work) which I regularly use IM on. I’ve already asked people to add two MSN Live Messenger accounts so I think asking them to add a third account (fourth if they still have my deprecated MSN account) is a bit overboard! This is where Jabber, and thus gTalk, beat Live Messenger for me. Jabber allows the same account to have multiple “resources” so I can be logged on in 4 or 5 places, and when someone messages me, it’ll hit me in all locations!
Without this feature, Live Messenger is almost dead to me. Most people are already using gTalk (in addition to Live Messenger), and a lot of the people I previously added on Live Messenger I wouldn’t chat with anyways – Facebook is a better replacement when keeping up with those people.
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