Windows Live Essentials 2011

After many months in beta, the official version of Windows Live Essentials 2011 (Wave 4) was finally released in early October. The very complete package includes updated versions of Messenger, Mail, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Family Safety, Writer and Mesh.

Chatting, emailing, blogging, editing photos and video, letting your kids surf safely, syncing documents between different PCs... basically you can do it all with this free software set from Microsoft. Of course, there are quite a few innovations in the various programs of Windows Live Essentials 2011. Messenger, for example, has become a lot faster, both in terms of logging in and video chatting. The downside here is that it is no longer possible to change your chat name. You should now use your real name and first name. The reason for this is the integration with external services such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Are you changing your name? Then that name can also be seen in Hotmail and SkyDrive.

Photo Gallery has also been thoroughly overhauled. The improved search functions and facial recognition are sure to please. However, the so-called Photo Fuse tool to obtain better group photos does not always work well. It is handy that you can put edited images directly on Facebook, Flickr or SkyDrive. In Windows Live Movie Maker, you can also publish your movies to YouTube or Facebook. In addition, the video editing program has become a lot easier to use and the program supports higher bit rates.

You can now publish your movie directly from Movie Maker to Facebook or YouTube.

There are no huge differences for the Windows Live Mail mail client. It is now possible to send multiple photos at the same time in the form of a so-called photo album.

The photo albums in Mail are beautiful and useful.

Microsoft's own blogging service turned out to be not really popular, so the software manufacturer decided to close Live Spaces. The Writer blogging tool is now linked to WordPress and we can only applaud that.

Windows Live Sync, the application to synchronize files between different computers, will be called Mesh in Essentials 2011. This program lets you use up to 5 GB of SkyDrive for data synchronization.

Parents who want their children to surf safely can still do so via Family Safety. There are no significant innovations here either.

A major advantage of the free package of 'essential' software that Microsoft offers is that you can choose exactly which components you wish to install. If you don't need Messenger or Writer, you simply don't need to install those programs. But this was of course already the case in the previous versions.

Not for XP

Microsoft will release this 2011 version exclusively for Windows Vista and 7. Microsoft has - to the annoyance of many users - announced for some time that it will discontinue support for the now ten-year-old operating system XP. So if you still want to use Essentials on Windows XP, you will have to run an old version.