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We got our computer (second hand) back in April/May of this year and immediately downloaded Yahoo Messenger, a must to use in all Yahoo Chat Rooms.

You can log on under as many aliases as you wish. Once logged onto the system there are a number of categories for you to enter ie: Teens, Romance and Relationships, Music etc.

You can enter the chat rooms in two different ways. If you have downloaded Yahoo Messenger you can enter via this way (which we found was the easiest) or via the web but you need Java enabled to see the chat window and to see who is in the room with you.

Once in you can start chatting.

There are a number of things that you can do within a chat message. You can add emoticons, ie smiley faces and certain ones do certain things. ie. will make an emoticon with big hands (ie a hug)and there are various others that you can do as well as the original ones, :-) ;-) etc.

You can also change the look of the text by making it a diffent colour, multi coloured, different font, size, bold etc.

You can choose to ignore (or "iggy") someone who is not being nice so that when they chat you won't see them chatting in your chat screen.

You can have the option to chat via typing or using a microphone to chat so that people with speakers can hear you. On some chat rooms people in there play music which can be fun!

There is a drawback with using the chat room via the messenger. You do on the odd occasion get "booted" from the chat room ie you'll get an error message saying that a program on your machine has caused an illegal function and will be shut down, this, 9 times out of 10 means that someone has "booted" you. This generally means that someone has hacked into your computer, found your messenger and booted you from the program. To stop this there are a number of things that you can do, firstly you can invest in a personal firewall (which is good anyway) to stop people hacking into your machine, you can also change your message settings within the messenger to say that when you are online other people can not see you

1. Start Yahoo! Messenger and log-in using the ID where you maintain your buddy list. Once you are logged-in, DO NOT enter the chat room using this ID. Just leave it running in the background or minimize it, so it doesn't clutter your desktop.

2. Click to open up the sign-in page of Yahoo!'s web-based chat client [http://chat.yahoo.com] and log-in using your chat room ID (the other account that you were supposed to create). Once you are logged in, choose either Chat 2.0 or Java and enter the usual room you go into.

Once you are comfortable with this setup, just tell your friends that the visible ID they see in the user list is used exclusively for chatroom posts and chat room voice, and that they should PM you through your "invisible" ID. And since your Yahoo! Messenger ID is not seen in the chat room by the user list, the booter does not know it, hence, Yahoo! Messenger is virtually unbootable -- literally. Even if the booter tries to boot you through the visible ID in the user list, you're still safe since Chat 2.0 and Java Chat are more resistant to booting. So, you can now sit back, relax, and laugh at the booter.

A nice "side-effect" of this setup is you can screen any new friends you meet in chat. Since they only know your visible ID, you can decide later on if you want to add them to your invisible ID.

Apart from getting booted download messenger from the Yahoo site or open in chat and start having fun and making new friends!

Thanks for reading
Alison