The future of communications!

Ok…so just the beta of MS Messenger 7.0, but made me chuckle anyway. Even if they’ve spoilt messenger by putting a DIRTY GREAT AD on almost every menu and window! It was bad enough with just the one advert on the main window, now if you accidentally click too low on the chat window you get a poxy ‘Blue Mountain’ link. Aaargh, let’s hope someone finds a way of bypassing that, it’s already driving me mad.

Bizarrely too, my router took several nosedives today; suspiciously relating to me installing the beta…I’ve now disabled the ‘voice/whiteboard/video’ NAT ALG (stupid terminology) on my router, and it seems ok. I’m always suspicious of such things; especially when my D-Link router is about a billion years old and there’s no recent firmware updates. God knows how shonky that code is. If I get half a mind later on I might run Ethereal and try and suss out what’s causing the problem. For now though I can live without the ALG; most decent clients seem to wiggle through the NAT without too much issue.