No beating around the bush, no sugarcoating, no bullshit: What's

Weechat on Arch Linux inside a VirtualBox VM.

>>56247360
Use Putty Tray to ssh into your irc shell running screen/tmux + irssi/weechat. Just less hassle, and you can get shell accounts by just asking people on more tech oriented channels or just rent your own VPS(check out lowendbox, you can get them for like dollar or two per month), just remember to install fail2ban, use key-based login and disable root login over SSH.

>>56247621
ramnode is also good for this but it doesn't answer OP's question

for windows 7 hexchat should be adequate