A few months ago, after witnessing Gaim’s releases slowing down, and being unhappy with the lack of customization the newest version offered I decided to give Miranda IM a try. However, the sheer amount of time it took me to just be able to see each other people’s avatars, and for them to see my own was ridiculous.

I had to surf with no end through various different forums, reading answers to every possible problem there could be with avatars, except my own. Also, at the time, Miranda used to crash very often, which eventually brought down my patience and I crawled back to Gaim, once again.

But recently, a friend of mine that also tried out Miranda back when I did told me that a new version had just been released, and that it was a big improvement, over the last one. And so, together, me and him, decided to give Miranda another try and lose ourselves in it’s endless options and customizations.

And in the end of this review, you will read and see the result.

First of all, as soon as you install Miranda, Avatars already work. File transfer work much better than MSN’s own file transfer. For some unknown reason, whenever I upload files via Miranda to any other MSN client, they are sent much faster than via MSN.

Secondly, Miranda still needs some forum navigation in order to solve your problems. But…. I must admit that they’ve really cleaned up their act since the last time I went there, and most of my problems I was able to solve by either searching the Options or by a quick search in their forums. And none of the problems took more than a few minutes to solve. And step by step I tweaked the client more and more to my liking. With no signs of loss of stability or speed.

The result of a couple of hours of customization:

A full featured, fully customized Messenger compatible with almost all known protocols.

Tuned exactly to my liking, with literally endless possibilities for customization.

So I hereby give Miranda, the crown for the multi-client IM programs for Windows, and I definitely recommend it to anyone that wants a nice IM. And remember, Miranda will be as complicated as you make it, the more plugins you add, the more things you can configure.

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