How to make ICQ faster?

[Evil Chris]

ok so I have a few hundred people on my ICQ contact list.
My ICQ loads up pretty slow, and jams up from time to time, and I think it's because I'm making it work pretty hard.

I don't really want to stop recording ICQ history though, because I tend to use it and search for things in conversations I've had.

So that being said, does anyone have any tips or tricks to make it faster and or more robust?

[thruma]

you could totally backup your history each month or week depending how large it gets.
Then burn it to cd.

Then clear it out.

when you burn it to CD don't finalize the cd that way you can keep adding to it each week.

have 100 directories with each persons name for the directory then put all convos from that person in each directory.

I think the history is in this directory
C:\Documents and Settings\YOUR_USER_NAME\Application Data\ICQ


If you want a small batch file or something that will back it all up at the click of a mouse let me know and I'll see what I can do :)

[Morphius]

Get rid if ICQ...it sucks big time

[Rochard]

Don't save your history - I don't.

[Mister X]

It's not the history that causes the slowdown. I like the history myself. Very useful feature. But the history is only being written to as you chat with someone. If you have a really huge log for a particular contact then it can slow down things a bit , but only when you chat with that person.

What causes the slowdown is the size of your contact list. The more people you have on the list the more time icq has to spend on checking who is online/offline, etc. It takes more cpu and more memory to do it.

Unfortunately the only thing you can do to speed it up is to dump as many contacts as possible. :(

A really useful feature would be a way to sort your contact list and see which ones you haven't talked to in the last 3 months or whatever.

[thruma]

Another thing to but I hate suggesting this to people because things can go really wrong when doing it but sometimes defragging the drive is they way to go as well.
If you defrag you must backup all the important stuff first. There is a very small chance your disk will become unrecoverable.
I never used to believe that until it happened to me.

And before doing that you could try using Bootvis if you're using winXP.
It speeds up the booting process by moving all the boot files into the areas of the harddrive that are accessed first.

It could just be thats the problem and ICQ has nothing to do with it.
Ok this is interesting. I went to look for a link for bootvis for you and I came up with this from MS http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/sysperf/fastboot/BootVis.mspx
It says there that bootvis doesn't actually speed your bootup despite lots of reports that it does.
Well ok I tried.

the other thing you can do and this really made my comp lighting fast is to disable services that you don't need.
This needs to be doen with caution as well because you might find yourself without your net connection if you disable the wrong services.
This guy here has a pretty good site with tutorials on it though.

http://www.blackviper.com/

Look at the menu on the left and go to "features"

To give you an idea my comp was booting up to 150MB before and I was able to skim it right down to 85MB boot.

The difference was very noticable and lightning fast.
:)

[FeTiShLaDy]

saving the history makes it slower so if i were you, you can save it somewhere

[Magnus3x]

List control.. it;s all about list control.. I am at the point now if I add one more person to my ICQ it crashes my puter.

But don't delete me.. *S*

[Evil Chris]

The problem with deleting users from your list is ICQ's home servers keep a record of your userlist now. I think that is a handy thing, actually because if you lose literally everything on yoru computer, you can start over with a new one, install ICQ, and you get your contacts back from their servers.

But, I've found that simply deleting users from your contact list locally doesn't always remove them from the ICQ central servers. That is, unless you answer YES to deleting that user's history as well.

After doing that (deleting several users along with their history), you computer will be so slow you won't be able to do anything else with it until you reboot it. But this seems to be the only way to geet ICQ running back at an acceptable speed.

The other option of course is to use the browser based ICQ version, which I have always found to be very fast, but no history option is available.

[thruma]

so my oringinal suggestion of backing up the history is still good.

just back it up then you have the history of everyone and you can start deleting users you don't want.
But don't delete me! ;)

[Funbrunette]

Get rid of all those people you have no idea who they are! That's what I did and keep adding to your ignore list! :cackle: