I am on DSL/Broadband connection right now using Trashy Tiscali and I also have MSN, Yahoo and AOL Instant Messengers and everything is fine for the most part during the day, but at night its totally HORRENDOUS!!!!! Every 5 or 10 minutes my Instant Messenger programmes keep booting off and booting back up again!! Its totally annoying!!! The weird thing is I can still access the internet and browse web pages!!!

Can anyone tell me, if this problem is the fault of the Instant Messenger programmes themselves or the fault of the ISP, or even the fault of this new Internet Explorer 7 that I installed about 3 months ago!!!????

Thanks!!

It's to do with bandwidth and contention ratios. More people are home in the evening and as (i assume) you have a home dsl package you will be on a 50:1 contention ratio so despite your quoted bandwidth that will be a MAX possible.

If you are in the UK that is a pain but there is nothing you can do because the ISP's don't have SLA's so you are pretty fucked.

Either upgrade and get more bandwidth or run less at once in the way of IM's etc.

Oh yeah and roll back to IE6.....7 is shite.

I concur with mdiver about IE7 - it's rubbish, so roll back to 6, but I'm not so sure about it being a bandwidth problem - even when there's high contention IM programs shouldn't be affected - the traffic on them is so low.

You could also try Trillian - it's free and it does AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, and IRC all in one. You can get it here http://www.download.com/C...73158.html

I've never had a problem with it, and it beats using several IM programs at once.