I absolutely love Google Talk because of its simplicity, and the fact that I’ve got all of my friends using it is a huge plus. There is only one thing that I really dislike with the instant messenger, and it’s that I can’t change my status to away.
A free program called gAlwaysIdle is looking to solve that problem. It provides an option in the Google Talk right-click menu that will let you always have your status set to away, whether or not your are using your computer:
It has three different modes that you can choose from:
- Normal Idle - Uses the default Google Talk settings
- Always Idle - You’re always set to idle
- Never Idle - Makes sure you are never set to away even when you’re not at your computer
As you can see from the screenshot above I was using this on Vista, but anytime I tried to change the status I got a fatal error. The only way to get around this is to run Google Talk as an administrator, or to disable the User Account Control (UAC) all together. My guess is that this program adjusts registry settings on-the-fly, and without the proper permissions in will crash and burn. As soon as I ran Google Talk as an administrator it worked as expected.
I wish that Google Would just implement this feature themselves … it would be so much easier. 
gAlwaysIdle Homepage [via Life Rocks]
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Tags: Freeware, Google, Newly Released, Software, Features, Google Talk, How To, Screenshots, Settings, Tips And Tricks
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I set myself as away all the time… Maybe we’re talking about different things here, but I have no problems changing my status on Vista.
You can’t set status to away on vanilla GTalk - you can set “Away” as a busy state, but another XMPP client will view this as “Do Not Disturb” rather than away.
Also Ryan, you say you had a UAC problem with it - how are you still running UAC so long after Vista came out? I tried to live with it for a week and disabled it, latest reformat I disabled it after two hours. It’s there to protect the PC against stupid people, and even then people click OK anyway because it shows up so often.
I still have UAC enabled — it’s not enough of an annoyance and doesn’t pop-up enough for me to feel compelled to disable it.
As Inferno_str1ke said, it’s not possible to do in Google Talk itself. If you’re using a third-party program, such as Pidgin or Miranda, then you can do it.
I don’t think it’s there to protect just stupid people. I went to college with people who were pretty darn good at hacking into computers, and the littlest things can compromise your system. Think about how many websites you go to in a days time that you’ve never visited before, such as from Digg. Can you trust them all? I may not agree with how UAC works all of the time, and I may even complain about it, but it’s there to provide added protection. I’m definitely not going to pass up an opportunity for extra security, and I can deal with the handful of prompts that I receive each day.
Ah, I see what you mean. But as for me, I just sign out whenever I leave the computer for long periods of time. Same with AIM.