Improving Your Skyping with Advanced Options

Advanced options are not absolutely essential to using Skype, but they can make things smoother. The options are as follows:

• Startup: If you anticipate using Skype frequently, you may want to have Skype start up automatically whenever you power on your computer.
• Automatically Answer Incoming Calls: Unless you have a special need to automatically connect to whomever calls you at the very first ring, you should leave this option disabled. There are special circumstances when you would want to automatically answer incoming calls, however.
• Enable Contacts List and History Quickfiltering: Choosing this option tells Skype to quickly locate any contact in either your Contacts list or history of chats by simply typing in any portion of a name. Only those items that match appear. As your list of Skype contacts and chats grow, Quickfiltering becomes an indispensable tool.
• Automatically Pause Winamp: Winamp is a freeware player that enables you to play music and video content. Winamp has many plugins (see www.winamp.com/plugins) that enable you to use it in conjunction with other programs. The advanced settings in Skype let you automatically pause Winamp during an incoming call. Suppose you’re working at your desktop and enjoying some peaceful music on your computer’s CD player. Suddenly you’re interrupted by a Skype caller. You answer the call, but the music hasn’t stopped playing! You’re hearing both the music and your Skype buddy at the same time. Your buddy isn’t hearing any of your music and doesn’t know why you sound so confused as you frantically scramble to stop the music. Wouldn’t it be nice if the music automatically shut off when you answered your Skype call? If your computer uses Winamp to play music, as many computers do, you can enable the Automatically Pause Winamp During Calls feature.