Windows Live Essentials 2011 Released

The latest release of Live Essentials is now released and available for download in a lot of languages. Now that Microsoft has cleaned up some of the services, especially Live Mesh, Live Folders and Live Sync, it’s almost like a dream come true.

Yes, Microsoft has a long way to go to make this a complete and transparent personal cloud service. But in my opinion, they’re getting there.

Keep up the good work and make Google and Apple look like kids on a grown up playground 🙂

Download Live Essentials from http://get.live.com.

UPDATE!
It seems like it’s a bit too early to cheer. There’s some compatibility issues with the display driver, a Windows update and IE9 beta which causes several of the applications to hang or crash. After doing some research and trouble shooting I found the solution described as a part of Microsoft’s release notes for Live Essentials 2011.

The problem occurs as a conflict between the display driver and an update Microsoft release to add new graphics functionality to Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. To resolve this issue, basically do the following:

1. Uninstall IE9 Technical Preview and Windows 7 SP1 Beta if installed.
2. Update display drivers, especially if you use ATI/AMD display controllers.
3. Remove KB2028560 from your computer.
4. Install release 2 of KB2028560 (requires "Genuine Windows”).

At least this resolved my issues, and I’m able to reinstall Internet Explorer 9 Public Beta without any problems! 🙂

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New beta release of Live Essentials

I just downloaded and installed the latest beta releases of Microsoft Live Essentials and it seems like Microsoft has taken other users comments into consideration when writing a new release.

The most important change (at least for me) is the merge of Live SkyDrive, Live Sync and Live Mesh. Since I use all three services, I’ve had a pain in the a… trying to figure out what kind of files to place were. There’s still a way to go but so far it looks great.

The client side Live applications has all been made more “Microsoft-ish”. With the ribbon and editing features most people know from the Office products since 2007. Personally I fancy Live Writer, which I use for both personal blogging, public blogging and page editing (articles etc.). The media support in the new release is heavily improved with the ability to insert video from both personal files, YouTube integrated accounts and from any streaming URL. Very cool indeed.

So far I haven’t found any major issue with the current beta and can recommend it to anyone, even if you use services from providers other than Microsoft.