My first impressions of the Windows Live Messenger Beta provoked a lively discussion on various issues (some on-topic, and some off-topic) but I’ve spent way too much time on that now (and in any case, I’m meeting up with the author of most of those comments in less than 48 hours so it will be far easier to bore our wives than to spend all afternoon and evening writing comments on this blog…) .

Anyway, here are some tips I found today for MSN Messenger 7.5 and 8.0 beta (Windows Live Messenger).

Removing those annoying tabs
As was the case for MSN Messenger 7.5, there seems to be no option for deleting tabs, just for changing the order in which they are displayed but if you go to Tools, Options, Security and set the checkbox where it says “this is a shared computer so don’t display my tabs” they will go away.

Removing the ads
Matthijs van de Water has some advice for removing ads from MSN Messenger 7.5 but it involves directly editing the Messenger binaries. I’ll leave it for now because the instructions will probably need updating for the new version and it’s in beta – so I expect there will be a few more updates yet!

Mess with MSN Messenger have produced a program called Mess Patch for customising previous versions of MSN Messenger. There are other patches available, but Mess with MSN Messenger is generally considered to be a trustworthy download location.

(Be aware that patching Windows Messenger, MSN Messenger or Windows Live Messenger infringes Microsoft’s Terms of Use. To do so would be your own choice I’m not responsible in any way.)

In any case save your bandwidth by making sure the Video Carousel is not enabled under Tools, Options, General (mine is greyed out).

Product team blog
The Windows Live Messenger product team have a blog. It’s not that useful – mostly “look what we’ve done in the product – isn’t it cool”, but probably a good way to feed back any comments on the beta.