Sometimes I find it hard to connect to my Windows Live Messenger since the Taiwan earthquake which disrupted Asia’s internet connection. Every time I connect, I get the error message “We were unable to sign you in to Windows Live Messenger, possible because of a problem with the service or with your Internet connection. Please make sure that you are connected to the Internet. Error code: 81000306“.

I am already connected to the internet and I can surf the Internet except it’s a little slower but connecting to Windows Live Messenger seems to be impossible at that time. Here’s how I fixed the problem.


I was lucky to accidentally found the fix for connecting to Windows Live Messenger. I was browsing through SourceForge and found a free third party Windows Live Messenger called Alvaro’s Messenger (aMSN). aMSN is a free open source MSN Messenger clone. I downloaded, installed, tried connecting and to my surprise, I was able to login to aMSN with all my contacts showing! Then I closed aMSN and tried signing in my Windows Live Messenger but couldn’t get to.

I’m not sure what’s wrong with my Windows Live Messenger but I do have problems in connecting it sometimes. But with aMSN, it never fails to connect. So if you need to chat with someone very urgently through MSN, use aMSN. The interface is quite similar to Windows Live Messenger except it’s simpler and without advertisements.

Features of aMSN
» Display pictures
» Custom emoticons
» Multi-language support (around 40 languages currently supported)
» Sign in to more than one account at once
» File transfers
» Group support
» Normal, and animated emotions with sounds
» Chat logs
» Event alarms
» Webcam support
» History in color
» Ability to autoclose the filetransfer window when it is finished
» New plugins log window (Alt-P)
» Plugins compatible with supported languages
» Faster loading skin window
» Skins in chatwindow
» Resizable chatwindow bottom
» When you add a new user, you can define in which group you want to add them
» When a contact change status, the top of the chat window changes color ( green for away, grey for offline, etc.)
» New panel GUI to alert when there’s a new aMSN version
» Possibility to download the new release directly by aMSN
» Automatically update language files and plugins from the web
» New gui for deleting users (also possible to block on deletion)
» Possible to add notes for each user (XML)
» Support for MSN Mobile service
» Tabbed windows so you can group conversations using tabs
» Status is displayed inside a frame, so it won’t dissapear when you scroll
» Display picture in notification alert (like MSN 7)
» Statistics for history (logging)
» Now possible to choose any state for your login status (before it was only possible to login invisible or online)
» Timestamping

Not only you can use aMSN for Windows, there are also aMSN for Linux, Mac OS X and FreeBSD. There are plugins and skins for you to customize your aMSN.

[ Download aMSN ]