MSN 7.0

For those of you who have not yet upgraded. Get on it.

Best feature so far: MSN 7.0 now has two name fields, one for your name (which is what you'll see if you're using 6.2 or lower), the other for comments which appear in italics. Ok, so what?

Well, there's also a switch that will, in realtime, plug the name of whatever song is playing in your preferred Mediaplayer into that field, so you can see what other people who have elected to show you, are listening to, in realtime. They say it only works for Mediaplayer 10, but it works at least for the latest release of iTunes, and I imagine it probably works for Winamp as well.

Once you get it, you'll find it's very busy and full of shit. The following hacks make life easier:

1) Get rid of those stupid tabs on the side of the contact list.
Tools -> Options -> Security.
Check 'This is a shared computer, so get rid of those stupid tabs even though that has nothing to do with this being a shared computer'

That may not be the exact text, but you get the idea.

2) Download this.
Run that sucker, it lets you pick which shit you don't want in MSN and rip it out (e.g. advertising, some of the buttons, also allows you to run multiple instances if you like).

Totally reversible if you want it back the way it was.

Enjoy.