Tweak MSN Messenger with APatch

Posted on July 21, 2008 at 5:17 am

I have mentioned several times previously, that I truly dislike over the top branding in applications I use, but there is one thing I truly despise, far more than heavy branding, and that is pushed advertising. I would never entertain using an application that feels it needs to present me with all sorts of advertisements and offers, in the hopes I will actually bother reading them and earn the developers a little affiliate income.

I would much rather pay a small fee for the software than have it try and lure me into purchasing something. Besides, on my limited bandwidth I don’t need flash animations and animated GIF filed being loaded and slowing me down.

Now it’s not just the small fish who like to try and scoop up a little extra revenue in this fashion, big players such as Microsoft also get into this annoying practice form time to time. I have purposefully kept using an old version of MSN messenger, due to the fact that Windows Live Messenger is full of advertising.

Lately, I have come to notice that a lot of my contacts are asking me to use file sharing and other applications that just do not run with my old messaging client, and have been forced to finally move to Windows Live Messenger.

I really hate the advertising, so started looking for a way to remove it, and what I found was a very cool application named APatch, not only can I use it to remove all branding and advertising, I can tweak over 90 other messenger settings, very cool. If you want to remove advertising using this application, simply fire it up and find the settings shown in the three screenshots below, keep clicking next until you find the right page.

As you can see from the final screenshot, when you are done, just click apply and APatch will modify your Windows Live Messenger install to make the changes you chose.

I am really happy I found this, I had wanted to update my messenger client for a long time, I had tried several others such as Trillion, Digsby and Pigeon, but none of them felt as if the integrated into windows as well as MSN Messenger does. By using APatch I have removed the single thing that stopped me doing this.

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One Response to “Tweak MSN Messenger with APatch”

Chris said on : July 21st, 2008 at 12:04 pm

The mess patch on http://www.mess.be/ does something similar, though it doesn’t have a preview as APatch does.

For anyone who uses MSN Messenger regularly I’d also recommend using Messenger Plus! at http://msgplus.net/ which adds several tweaks and features.