iChat without .mac?

[thechris69]

Hello,

I went to register iChat but it says I need a .mac account, which ends up costing $110 a year, and as a U of T student I dont have that kind of money at the moment...

Is there any way I can use iChat without having to pay $110 a year for it?

Someone mentioned something to me with regards to AIM and its compatibility with iChat but I wasn't sure what they meant

 

[Tallest Skil]

Get a Gmail account and sign up for AIM with that. Both are free. Use that AIM account to log into iChat.

 

[kornyboy]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5F136 Safari/525.20)

You should be able to use it without having a MobileMe account. If you can't get that to work I'd suggest downloading Adium. It's free.

 

[Verto]

Yes, you can use an AOL/AIM account for iChat.

Just go to the iChat Preferences -> Accounts, add new account.

You can also use GoogleTalk.

 

[TEG]

Just click cancel when it asks, then use the iChat Preferences and to add your AIM account.

TEG