AIM Very Slow On Windows

During my vacation in China, I tried to install AIM on my friends' Windows XP machine (notebooks). The reason is that I thought it might be easy to do video chat with my iMac since iChat only supports AIM accounts.

I only had once success to see my iMac side since I did not have video camera in China. Later on I realized that the Windows browsing becomes very slow. I am not sure it is AIM issue or the internet connection issue. The connections are all ADSL through telephone line. By chance, when I uninstalled AIM on one machine, the painful connection retained back to normal. I am not sure why.

It is too sad that I have no choice to use Skype to do video chatting.

iChat

I have been tried to use iChat since I got my iMac. The problem is that I did not like to create .Mac trial account (I have to provide credit card information) or to create an AIM account since I have hotmail, yahoo mail and google mails. I have got enough emails. I don't think I need another email. Then I tried to use iChat without these account. I have never to get it working.

Then I choose other chat programs such as Adium for chat, and Skype for audio and vedio chatting. All these work fine.

I have watched iChat demo vedios and they are so impressive. Finally I give up on my ground on not new emails. I created AIM account today. Then iChat starts to working. I can share my screens with another user on Mac within my home network. For Windows users, I could start video chat! That's cool. I'll have to test to chat with a real user outside country to see if it is better than Skype or not.

It is so sad that I have to use AIM or .Mac accounts to make iChat working. I don't have too many people I know who use AIM account. I could ask some of them to install AIM chat application and to create an AIM account. That's really inconvenient because I could not add other yahoo or hotmail friends directly.