mIRC tutorial - Download mIRC

IRC (Internet Relay Chat) was intended as a simple chat protocol. It has become much more over time. Its the biggest chat worldwide. Millions of people chat on thousands of servers all over the world. But not only text can be transferred via IRC, files such as mp3's and movies can be sent via IRC.
So what is mIRC you might ask? mIRC is a program which allows windows users too connect to the irc network.
This tutorial is geared towards novice users. It explains every step in detail how to connect to a server and start chatting. Enjoy!

> Once you start mIRC you should see a window like the one below. There might be an advertisement banner and/or an options screen appearing. Close them.

> When you start mIRC for the first time, the background should be white, the screenshots here, are black. Don't worry about that, its an option in mIRC, which lets you change its appearance.

> To see a list of available servers, click the button, to display the options menu

> If you know the server you want to connect too, select it from the dropdown list, entitled "IRC Servers:" (Use the top one too filter the server's and the bottom one to select one). If you just want to start chatting I suggest you select "Random EU DALNet Server" or "Random US DALNet Server".

> Enter values in the field "FullName", "e-mail address", "nickname", and "Alternative".
If you dont have a nickname, use a combination of your first name and surname, or just make one up. Just try that your nickname is individual. For example if your name is John T Cooper. Don't make your nick John, but JCoop, due to the fact that nicknames are unique. The alternative field is used as nickname, if your original nickname is in use.

> Connect to the IRC network by clicking "Connect to IRC Server".

> You should see lots of text flashing up on your screen, and might here some peeps, don't get worried, that's normal. Once the text has frozen, and no error message occurred, you are logged on. You can't chat just now. You will have too join a channel first.

> Joining a channel is easy. Just type "/Join #channel" or "/j #channel".

> Displaying all channels on server, is simple done by click on the "Display channels" icon. (on big servers this can take some time, so I would suggest entering in the "match text" field some criteria for what you're looking for. I.e. if you are looking for a star trek channel, you might want to enter "star trek" in the match text field. To enter a channel double click on it.

> Once entered a channel, you will see in the main area of the screen the ongoing chat conversation, and on the right, all people currently in the chat. To talk individually to a person, double click his name.

> You can switch between windows by clicking on the chat/person name on the top toolbar. If there is new text in the window, it will blink red.

That's it for the basic tutorial.