Wittytwitter

Wittytwitter is a free open-source Twitter program that is easy to use.

It is simple to install and has a clean one column interface. There are buttons to switch between recent posts, replies, your information and direct messages and searching for tweets.

Posts appear with the user's portrait and right-clicking produces a menu for replying or retweeting messages. A small pop-up message will also appear when new messages are found.

There are plenty of ways of tweaking Witty in the Options window including setting whether it starts with Windows or not, which is much easier than adding or removing an entry in the Startup folder by hand. There are several different skins and the interval for checking for new messages can also be changed.

One great time saver is that links are automatically shortened using one of five different services including is.gd and tinyurl.

We found that it was faster than TweetDeck on our test computer. It might not have quite as many features, but it's a good choice for older computers.