How to open up multiple instances of Google Talk

The other day I started up another Google account so I can chat to business clients on Google Talk and keep it separate from my personal chatting on my main Google Talk account. This immediately made me realise a problem – how can I have both Google ID’s running on Google Talk at the same time?

There are two options. One is the option I advocated on MakeUseOf back in September which is to make use of the “run as” command in the right-click menu. This one involves making multiple Windows user accounts which may not be acceptable to some people as this creates lots more folders in Windows Explorer.

The other is to create a new shortcut on the desktop (right-click on the desktop, choose “new” then “shortcut”) and in the shortcut properties box, add the path to your Google Talk application in the target box. Make sure though that at the end, you add /nomutex

So my shortcut would be :

“I:\Programme\Google\Google Talk\googletalk.exe” /nomutex

When the shortcut is completed, you will then get a nice Talk icon on your desktop and you can now drag it (if you so wish) into your start menu and / or your Windows Quick Start dashboard.

There seems to be no limit to the number of Google Talk’s you can run at the same time. As well as maintaining several chat personas, you can also have multiple Talk’s open to check the email for different Gmail accounts or to update to different Twitter accounts.