Windows Live Essentials: What is it?
In the next few weeks I hope to publish a few short articles on the topic of Microsoft’s upcoming release of its Windows Live Essentials software suite. In order to start these articles of on the right foot, I feel that I should take a minute to talk about what Windows Live Essentials is exactly and describe, briefly, its constituent elements.
What, then, is Windows Live Essentials? Put simply, it is the next major release of a suite of software that Microsoft develops and distributes freely to the public. The software is intended to provide additional functionality to Windows operating system and is aimed at the consumer market. It is currently compatible with Windows XP with SP2 (32-bit edition only) and Windows Vista (32-bit and 64-bit editions).
Below is a list of what I consider the most important applications from the suite. More exist, but they are out of the scope of this article.
Windows Live Mail
What it is: A new and updated email program.
Replaces: Windows Live Mail is designed to replace two programs: Outlook Express 6 (which ships with Windows XP) and Windows Mail (which ships with Windows Vista.)
Windows Live Messenger
What it is: Windows Live Messenger is Microsoft’s Instant Messaging client. It allows users to communicate and interact with friends and family via text-based chat and video and audio calls. It also offers games to play with them as you talk.
Replaces: Nothing. It is merely the next version.
Windows Live Photo Gallery
What is is: Windows Live Photo Gallery is a photo management application. It offers basic photo editing (e.g. Adjust exposure, Adjust color, Straighten photo, Crop photo, Fix red eye, and more), the ability to publish photos straight to various web services (MSN Soapbox by default Flickr. More services are available through downloadable plug-ins.), and more.
Replaces: Windows Photo Gallery
Windows Live Writer
What it is: Windows Live Writer is a rich-text, WYSISYG (What You See Is What You Get) text editor that is designed for bloggers. Think of it as Microsoft Word for blogging. Works with many services, including (but not limited to) Microsoft’s own Spaces, Google’s Blogger, WordPress and TypePad.
Replaces: Your web-blog host’s web-based blog-authoring tool. (Woo! That’s a mouthful!)
Windows Live Movie Maker
What it is: Windows Live Movie allows users to edit and create movies and videos.
Replaces: Windows Movie Maker in Windows Vista. Windows Live Movie Maker is not supported on Windows XP.
Windows Live Sync
What it is: Windows Live Sync allows a person to synchronize their personal files and folders to multiple computers via the internet. For example, you could create a folder “Current Projects” and synchronize it between your laptop and your home desktop. Any changes made to Current Projects from the laptop or the desktop will replicate (viz. sync) to the other computer as soon as both computers are taken online.
Currently, Windows Live Sync allows you to synchronize up to 20 Libraries (viz. folders) with up to 20,000 files per folder.
Tip: Windows Live Sync integrates with Windows Live Photo Gallery and allows you to easily keep your personal photo collection in sync between all your computers (assuming you have enough free hard drive space on all your computers, that is).
Windows Live Toolbar
What it is: The Windows Live Toolbar is a Internet Explorer browser add-on which provides easy access to Windows Live services (e.g. Hotmail, Photos, Calendar, etc.) and Live Search. Live Search is Microsoft’s search engine services, also available at http://www.live.com/.
Replaces: Nothing.
Where can I download the Windows Live Essentials suite?
You can download it from: http://download.live.com/ Please note that although Windows Live Essentials will be finalized very soon, it is still a beta product and as such, it may undergo tweaking before being realized. Upon being released, the URL may also change. However, in spite of not yet being finalized, my experience with all the applications has been splendid. They have performed superbly and have not crashed once.
More to Come
In the following articles, I hope to examine a few of these applications in more detail, give any tips and tricks that I have picked up while using them, and explain ways that I think they can benefit you.
I hope that you found this first attempt at informative, technical blogging helpful. Please leave any comments, corrections, or questions you may have in the comments.
