configgum

I’m slowly but surely migrating from Yahoo to Google for my email, but what I REALLY need is a better app for video calling. I’m still using Yahoo for the most part, or at least to start calls…the audio quality takes a dive anywhere from 2 seconds to half an hour into the call but it ALWAYS happens sooner or later. Between that and the intermittent freezing up of the video feed on both ends, midway through a conversation one of us will end up saying, “Screw this, let’s go to Skype.” Half the time YM just freezes up completely, forcing me to kill the program anyway.

But Skype…oh man, Skype. I mean, it’s no secret that Skype’s a huge resource hog. For me it’s not so bad on a straight voice call, at least it’s only around 20% of the time the connection is absolute crap, but it doesn’t run my cpu into the ground the way it does in a video call. I’m talking about 100% maxed out, nothing loading, system spazzing out…until eventually the whole thing just locks up and it’s reboot time.

Part of me would love to ditch both forever. I sure can’t take the bouncing back and forth any longer. It won’t be too hard let go of Yahoo. I will miss the games though. And all the emoticons (oh be quiet). But I do still rely on Skype for regular calls and voicemail. I really wish they would just get their sh!t together. What have they been doing the past like…5 years? I mean, what the HELL people? </rant>

So I did some digging around for other voip apps and tips. My conclusions and what I’ve changed so far:

Went ahead and chucked Yahoo messenger for Digsby (but if that’s too bloaty I’ll go with Pidgin instead).

Uninstalled and reinstalled Skype, making sure to hit that options box under the “do you agree” bit and uncheck the PM manager. I never realized it was optional, but that’s the damn thing that’s always eating up the most of my system, so I’m hoping this will make a huge difference. Otherwise, SightSpeed sounds promising. It is slightly more expensive for the pro services, but it sounds like it more than makes up for it in video quality. I’ll probably download the free one soon anyway, just to compare.

And then I was kind of on a roll, so I ran CCleaner, then I cleaned up my programs folder, and then…

I finally got rid of QuickTime, hooray! I found QuickTime Alternative - the same codecs but lighter without the rest of Apple’s crap. Well, that’s what they say. I’m still a little skeptical but hey, R-day is coming so I’ll give it a go. I didn’t install Media Player Classic with it though, so I don’t know if I’ll have to get their other codec pack to use with my media player. Which is kinda up in the air right now because I am DONE with Windows Media Player and Real Player (and you better not even mention iTunes around me). But that’s another can of worms…