Windows Live Essentials 2011

Windows Live Essentials 2011 offers some free and useful applications. Here is my overview on all the optional applications. You can choose what applications you wish to install if you click on �Custom install� when prompted.

The good:

Mail
Windows Live Mail is an excellent mail program. I have used Mozilla Thunderbird but it was very unstable and the interface looked outdated (compared to Live Mail). The ribbon interface makes the program very easy to understand and use. Also the overall modern feel of the program and fast response makes it very pleasant to use. The quick search with live results is also extremely useful.

Writer
Writer can be very handy if you have a blog. You can add all your blogs in this program and compose / edit your posts. Easily insert images or videos by uploading them or choosing a video from an online service by pasting the video URL or logging in to your online video account like YouTube. The only feature I miss here though is to see a total overview of all your posts per blog and be able to delete posts.

Photo Gallery and Movie Maker
Photo Gallery is highly improved compared to the standard Windows Photo Gallery that is shipped with Windows. Now it comes with face recognition and you are able to easily upload photos to your online account like Facebook, Youtube, etc,, If your preferred online sharing service is not listed in the publish box, try to find it in the Plugins that you can download.
Movie Maker is also a very handy free movie editor. It can accept almost any video and image format and comes with transitions, effect and you can even speed up or slow down your video. Publish the movie directly to your YouTube account or other sharing service, or save the video on your desktop.

Windows Live Mesh
Allows you to share and sync folders with friends and other computers in your personal network. It uses a �p2p� (peer-to-peer) or (computer-to-computer) system so the transfers are directly to the other computer rather than through several servers. You could say that it is like �cloud� file sharing, as it can also download the same file from other computers in the network to speed up transfer. I use this a lot to sync my music and wallpapers with all my computers. There is no file size or sharing limit (like other similar paid services do).

The Bad:

Messenger
Personally I do not use this. I remember years ago when I used one of the first versions of MSN messenger. It was a small, lightweight, advertising-free chat application. In time I have seen it change. Tabs and banners were introduced and some other things I rather not see. Since then I stopped using MSN Messenger and moved to Pidgin, also because I have a Gmail account and wish to be available on Google Talk as well. I did test the new Messenger and it was just as I expected. The program got even bigger (visually) and now it�s more a browser than a small and simple chat client.

Messenger Companion
Since I do not use Messenger I did not bother installing this. In the description is says that it allows you to share links to websites with your friends. I wonder what happened to the good old �Select URL, CTRL+C, click on chat window, CTRL+V ?

Family Safety
I have tried this myself and have set it up to block only �adult� websites. However, it was also blocking me from viewing regular sites and I had to constantly allow access to sites that do not contain �adult� material. Also sometimes the online service was down and I could not allow access to a regular website until the online service was back up. I highly recommend using K9 Web Protection instead of Family Safety.

Bing bar
Just what the world was looking for, another toolbar to add to the Internet Explorer clutter. If I want to use Bing I rather go to the website or add Bing search to my FireFox search box. I have even tried Bing myself instead of Google and too often it did not find what I was looking for. The difference with Google is that usually the first result in google is exactly what I have been looking for. In Bing it is usually the fifth or never.