So with google's new voice features in gmail, my mom and I were discussing using it, because now we have cellular minutes to worry about. She wanted a USB phone to use, I mentioned MagicJack and decided to just grab that.
I had spent Friday changing the OS on my tiny thinclient to Windows 2000, and MagicJack doesn't support Windows 2000. Rather than hack that old news, I put a full copy of XP Pro back on the machine. It had previously been running MicroXP, and I wasn't sure if it had everything needed. Soooo after the OS installation it worked fine..
The device is just an audio controller with interface to phone line, and a ringer... So the softphone is the real player in this game. During the signup procedure I was offered deals on paying for 5-years, buying more magicjacks, etc. Felt like a GoDaddy.com order! hah. So after I declined all the offers I got to pick my area code and prefix. Vanity numbers are per year! A one time fee, I understand, but they're $10/yr to pick a full vanity, and $3/yr to pick last-4 after selection of an area code and prefix.
So the thin client is rather under powered. I noticed if I minimized the softphone, and picked up my cordless phone handset, the softphone would restore its window and I heard a jitter in the dial-tone. The system shouldn't ever really be running anything else, but I decided I'd fix that by increasing the process priority. I created this small batch file which I named mj.cmd in the MagicJack directory (C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\Application Data\mjusbsp) to place into my Startup folder.
@echo off start /realtime magicjack.exe
I also disabled lots of bells and whistles of XP, setup auto-logon, etc. But this is about MagicJack not windows setup this time...
Now it's great! :)
I don't care for the advert type images being constantly loaded in the softphone. They're just a small annoyance. All worth the $20/yr service I suppose. It's not free like google voice, but much easier to setup as a normal phone.
I've only used it once today, but didn't notice any signalling when the other party hung up.. Oh well. It's all good and I'm happy with my $40 spend so far. If I had to keep my desktop on 24/7 tho, things would be different. I wish they put-in the effort to sell a $50 ATA instead of this quick cheap softphone solution. Of course, there are methods out there to do this, but I'm not messing with that now, since I have this.
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