Shoutbox

Go to tools and personal and check the box thats says "Show me as away when I'm inactive for xx minutes" ... when you press win-L to lock your workstation, Messenger will set your status automatically to "idle", which means that you would be away (at least for all unpatched Messenger clients ). Hope this helps!

As I tried to say before, I don't want to rely on a timeout.  If I have the timeout set to something small, even 5 minutes, then I'll still have people messaging me for the first 4:59, thinking I'm online.  If I set it to anything lower, then I'll show as Idle/Away when I'm reading a large web page or someone stops in to talk for a minute.

Not really, idle depends one the movement of the mouse, you'll move your mouse while reading a big page, I think?

quote:

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Originally posted by beastie
I don't want that.  I'm away, not busy.

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Sorry if I'm bieng cocky but if your away your doing smoething wich means your busy

Sleeping isn't busy?  Anyways, back to subject, MSN doesn't depends on last message sent, it depends on your mouse movement.

quote:

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Originally posted by beastie
As I tried to say before, I don't want to rely on a timeout.  If I have the timeout set to something small, even 5 minutes, then I'll still have people messaging me for the first 4:59, thinking I'm online.  If I set it to anything lower, then I'll show as Idle/Away when I'm reading a large web page or someone stops in to talk for a minute.

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sorry, when I was not clear in my answer . You can set the time to whatever you want. When you press win-L Messenger will immediately change your status to Idle/Away. I thought, that was what you want...

Away, busy... what's the difference?

There's a setting somewhere that I've seen where you can still get audio alerts when set to busy... so that would make away and busy all but the same, minus the asthetics such as name and icon.

andy

quote:

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Originally posted by GroteSmurf
sorry, when I was not clear in my answer . You can set the time to whatever you want. When you press win-L Messenger will immediately change your status to Idle/Away. I thought, that was what you want...

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That would be fine, but it didn't work for me in my testing.  I still showed as online in my colleague's MSN session.

quote:

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Originally posted by beastie
That would be fine, but it didn't work for me in my testing.  I still showed as online in my colleague's MSN session.

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Check your options, because i do exactly the same and it works for me every time

I think away is meant to be considered *not by the computer* and busy *by the computer but working on something*. Thats what I always took it for anyway. But back to the point, when I press Win+L my Messenger seems to auto set to idle/away anyway.