Now is a good time to try out a more fully featured client.
HydraIRC
mIRC
Trillian

Oh, so now I have to learn some more new stuff. You know I didn't sign up for all the schooling and learning 101.       

So Zubaz, which one of those clients do you recommend?   

I like and use Trillian because it aggregates other chat clients too (AIM, yahoo, MSN, IRC).

Well since I only come to the IRC here would it make much difference? Is Trillian easy to pick up on and use?

Philly; you want a simple IRC client, try this one Talkative

Will downloads stop continuing to be pushed to SDC? I find that there are newer versions of some things in SDC that aren't in Impulse which makes me use SDC instead.

You mean I didn't have to write my own in QBasic?

Here's what I mean by Impulse is sluggish.......

Not only is Impulse slow to respond to mouse clicks, but I noticed a new ObjectDock Plus update.... 22MB, so I timed the download with a stopwatch timer. I made sure nothing else was downloading during the OD+ Update.

Download Starting: 2 minutes
Connecting: gave up watching at the 17:30 mark, and left the room

When I returned to my desk, download was at 38%: 21 minutes
Download finished: 31:26

31+ minutes for a 22MB download.

I immediately downloaded Open Office to compare ......120MB: 12 minutes

If this is BITS at work, I'm really not impressed.

I'd imagine that soon, Impulse will get the updates first and we'll be weened off SDC.

I'll miss her . . but I missed Component Manager for about a week too.  It may work better than the options. 

Is there any way to point Impulse to our installs to prove they exist? As I mentioned earlier, Impulse doesn't believe that I have installed Dark Avatar or Twilight of the Armor, which I most certainly do. Stardock Central recognizes them fine.

The last thing I want to do is download those applications and have them installed again. For all I know it could wipe out configurations I have already set up.

-HM

I miss having the link to the Application Histories, where one could see the changes that have been implemented in the update.

Ok, I was able to hack the registry and fix my problem. It seems under the appropriate key (hkey_local_machine\software\stardock\drengin.net\galciv2, then looking at the entries for darkavatar and twilight under that) the key values that should be denoted as "exe" were completely missing for Dark Avatar and Twilight.

Once I added them, and pointed them to the right place (I used the same path that was used for GalCiv2's "exe" key value), Impulse recognized the games and said they were installed. They of course want to update to an oh so slightly different version than the one that SDC says is current, but that appears to be par for the course for Impulse over SDC.

-HM

Impulse looks great & all, but if it crashes on launch on a garden variety Dell XPP SP2 rig, it's not much use. For that reason in particular, I would not recommend forcing us to abandon SDC any time soon. I respectfully request that be delayed until Impulse actual installs & works.

I'm a little disappointed (maybe a lot disappointed) in the decision to use BITS - Windows Update fails virtually every time I use it on every one of my XP machines - it just locks up after updates are downloaded and installation is initialized (I'm doing nothing else when I update). It will sit there @ 0% progress on the first update for an hour or more, I'll have to kill it with TaskManager & the only way to rerun it is to reboot & try again, which sometimes works. I waste incredible amounts of time getting updates to install to completion - I don't look forward to having similar issues with ObjectDesktop application updates. Whatever method is used with SDC is not broken: it is lightning fast and trouble-free - hard to understand why it needed to be "fixed."

Impulse updated itself this morning. Now the games that were available with the original Drengin.Net subscription are not listed as being available in the Games tab. Only the GC I and II stuff along with Sins are listed. This missing games are shown in the Registration tab.

+1 to the speed issue mentioned by Koasati. It's currently... well slow on Vista Ultimate.

I can't seem to find a way to say install component x here. E.G. I want to install CursorFX on drive D:. Mayhap I missed it.

At the risk of being annoying... still no history or archive functions.

During the Impulse update, well... What would have happened had I been in thew middle of a component update? There was certainly enough time for me to hit the Update tab and start a download. Would the update to Impulse have waited until the component update finished?

OK, nfortunately, I am starting to have many problems with Impulse. It tries to update itself and veeeeery slowly downloads updates. Then it still says it needs to update if I try to download anything. So I restart it and it updates itself again. Restart, same thing. Multiple times it fails trying to decompress a file because it claims some other application is using it. Nothing was using it to my knowledge, but I rebooted to make sure and launched ONLY Impulse. Still it couldn't decompress its own update. I have uninstalled it, and like another user I had to use Revo Uninstaller. It found a ton of files left behind. It also warned me about uninstalling Impulse because it thinks it is a "System component." Normally it only gives that error if you try to uninstall a Windows component, so I am wondering why it thinks Impulse is a system component using whatever heuristic detection it uses. Clean installing Impulse now...if it ever finishes. It is hung on the please wait screen and is showing the progress bar complete on https://stardock.cachefly.net/impulse/300/impulse.7z. Just sitting there. I will try the MS uninstaller, but Revo uninstalls cleaner than anything else I have ever tried and it has never failed to find pieces before. Very rarely it will find a few false positives. I really like Impulse. I just wish I could get it to work smoothly. I am not criticizing the overall design and programming or anything. I know it is a beta and will have glitches at this stage. I hope you can get the downloading and installing problems some of us have been having fixed soon but it takes however long it takes and I know that too. If worst comes to worst and it takes a little time to get it working for everyone, those of us having problems with it can always just use the Wincustomize site until then.