Neowin.net

Happy Birthday Neowin!

Its 1 year ago today that we first opened Neowin to the public. In that year we have had amazing success with the site, I as webmaster have seen at least 3 peaks in the first year only to be destroyed through bad hosting. The people that come here have proven to us time and time again that loyalty is a valued thing on the internet, despite downtimes of up to 2 weeks you guys have come back and sent supportive emails and even gone as far as to arrange a dedicated team at Hosttyme to host us. We have seen people try to hack us, sites who steal news without credit and despite this we are still going strong.

We have an amazing news team and dedicated posters on the forums that in my opinion are fast to help people with problems, its a joy for me to read through the forums and see people really supporting each other.

We have had a bumpy ride up till now with the first year, heres hoping the second will be alot smoother :)

Thanks everyone who makes Neowin what it is.

     MIRC’s high point is its stability, but there is nothing more to the program. For a beginning user, it doesn’t have a nice setup script to assist the user for the first time, unlike the other clients reviewed. MIRC is also not very customizable. You have what you have and that is it. You can write custom scripts, but the script editing is extremely poor. Lastly, MIRC does not allow you to connect to multiple servers without additional plug-ins. This is an extreme pain to have to go through. I need to idle on every network possible!
     Bersirc is an extremely good choice for the beginning user. Its UI is very clean and the setup scripts are very easy to follow. The side of the UI has what looks like will be a MS style task pane in new versions. It will be a great assistant when you are getting started. The UI is very programmable, but it does not have a good script editor built in by default. Connecting to a server is very easy in Bersirc. You are just a click away from the favorite servers. The downside to connecting is that it is not very easy to connect to multiple servers. You have to type in the individual server name for each. In addition, Bersirc suffers from stability issues. Do not even try to DCC files. Lastly, Bersirc has the only easy to use notification system. It was very easy to monitor if someone was online or off.
     Klient is my favorite IRC program. The actions are very customizable. It has an incredible amount of features. It will do anything that you ask it to do and 10x more. The setup script is not as good as Bersirc, but it still does well. The UI of Klient is somewhat cluttered. There is a maze of user options. Klient is almost as stable as MIRC, and it has an incredibly small memory footprint. Klient is based more for an IRC op than your casual user.
     I wouldn’t recommend that anyone use MIRC. If you are just starting IRC, use Bersirc. It’s very clean and quick to learn. If you are an op or power user, you need the power of Klient. You can’t beat it’s versatility and speed.