Skype!

I've been using Windows Messenger to voice chat with my family for ages now, but with an unwanted side effect: random blue screens of death + automatic reboot. Completely random it seems, it didn't matter if I was surfing the net at the same time or not; sometimes I would be busy on photoshop for hours and no crash, other times I would be careful to do nothing besides chat and it would crash in 2 seconds.

Today we tried Skype, a similar program. We chatted for over 30 minutes with no crash, and hardly any of the omnipresent clicks, squeaks, and buzzing that we are used to with Messenger. In fact, we were amazed by the clarity of the call. I'm going to keep trying it, but so far I'm pretty impressed. Even better, you can voice chat with 5 people at the same time, and with Messenger you're limited to just one. The only thing it doesn't do is video conferencing, which kind of sucks but isn't a really big deal right now.