When traveling abroad, you rely on your passport to provide identification, allow you to cross borders, and get you through checkpoints. In your online meanderings, a Microsoft Passport can be just as indispensible. It's your one-click pass for keeping in touch with friends and family as you make your way around the virtual (or literal) globe.

Don't leave without your Passport
With Passport, a MSN Hotmail� account, and MSN Messenger Service 2.2 installed on your computer, you can log on to Hotmail from almost anywhere to check for Hotmail or other e-mail, plus find out if your friends or family are on line to have real-time conversations using Messenger. In fact, Passport is the secret to the simplicity of Messenger Service because it creates an encrypted profile using a single name and password when you first sign up for Hotmail.

There's no place like the home page
Simply tell Passport to remember your name and password, and thereafter log on with one click�the profile is sent to the site without you having to retype the information. Connect to the MSN home page to view messages waiting in your Hotmail account, see which of your contacts are online, and get news updates. Or, on a rain day, catch some action through a DirectPlay game using Messenger Service.

Talk is cheap
Internet Explorer groupies can rejoice, since Microsoft Outlook Express 5 (included as part of the free Internet Explorer 5 download) also interacts with Messenger. Messenger loads an online Contacts pane into the bottom left corner of Outlook Express that tells you who is online so you can send them an instant message.

To run MSN Messenger Service, you need:

• A 486/66 processor or above;
• Windows 95 or above;
• 8mb RAM;
• 2MB disk space; and
• Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator versions 3.0 or higher.

Either War and Peace or Alligator Clips
Here's a tip: If you are planning to use Hotmail and Messenger Service in a third-world country, take along a screw driver, extra Xjack telephone cord, wire cutters and some alligator clips because you might need to connect your laptop to a rotary phone. Either that, or bring some good reading material and plenty of stationary.

 
George Legge  says "Da!"  to using Messenger Service when he's in Russia so he can get instant hockey updates.