Recovering Forgotten Passwords I - IM Clients

As you all certainly know from reading Tuesdays' article, I am now using Digsby for my IM client. I decided to force my wife to jump on the bandwagon herself, so I removed Windows Live Messenger from her computer, and installed Digsby.

When setting up a new Instant Messenger client, obviously you need to setup your accounts. For that, you need passwords. Of course, I installed Digsby when my wife was sleeping so I couldn't ask her for her password.

I knew she had it saved in Windows Live messenger, so I needed something that could unhide her password, or just simply show me. That is when I found a handy new tool (New to me anyway).

This software is called MessenPass from Nirsoft. From their site:

MessenPass is a password recovery tool that reveals the passwords of the following instant messenger applications:

• MSN Messenger
• Windows Messenger (In Windows XP)
• Windows Live Messenger (In Windows XP And Vista)
• Yahoo Messenger (Versions 5.x and 6.x)
• Google Talk
• ICQ Lite 4.x/5.x/2003
• AOL Instant Messenger v4.6 or below, AIM 6.x, and AIM Pro.
• Trillian
• Miranda
• GAIM/Pidgin
• MySpace IM
• PaltalkScene
• Digsby

I see some of you hackers out there drooling. Calm down a bit, because this tool can only be used for the logged on user. As in my situation above, I was running the application under my wife's account. But when I did, oh boy! Lots of passwords came up like in this example:

The makers of MessenPass have some other cool password recovery tools. Stay tuned tomorrow for Part II.

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Don't feed the Pidgin's!

Let's dive right into the fun stuff. That's right, no pre-amble, no mumbo jumbo. Just pure unadulterated fun stuff. I'm talking about things we do on the computer for fun. There are several things right? Games, myspace, email etc. I'm going to talk about instant messaging! We all have our favorites right? My cousin and my brother like Yahoo messenger, while some of my friends prefer ICQ or IRC. Personally, I'm an MSN guy myself. So what are you supposed to do? Install three or four instant messenger clients on you computer? You can, but then they all eat up resources and eventually slow your computer down.

No, the solution is to get a client that will handle multiple Instant messaging services all bundled into one client. There are a few out there, Trillian is one, but to get all of the good fetures you have to pay for it. Let me introduce you to Pidgin. You may have heard of it by it's former name, GAIM. Pidgin services multiple instant messaging services ( AIM, Gadu-Gadu, Group Wise, ICQ, IRC, MSN, QQ, SILC, Simple, Sametime, XMPP, and Yahoo). Of course, like everything else I write about it is 100% free.

The only problem I see with Pidgin is that there is no video conferencing support like with the new MSN Messengers (More accurately Windows Live Messenger), or Yahoo messenger. The old version of the program, Gaim had a version that supported video and voice conferencing. That version is called Gaim-VV and is currently only available for Linux.

So do the math; multiple IM clients equals multiple processes running simultaneously which equals slower computer. Less Clients equals less processing power requirements which equals faster computing. If you are looking to consolidate IM clients, and aren't concerned with video conferencing, then you should probably check out Pidgin.

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