An Overview of Windows Live Essentials 2011

Microsoft’s Windows Live Essentials 2011 suite includes free products for mail, photos, instant messaging, movies, writing, and more. It’s been in beta for the past few months but now it’s officially released and Microsoft has started pushing it through a recent Windows update.

This article will provide an overview of what to explore in this latest version of Live Essentials and how to install the programs. In the coming weeks, we will be publishing various tutorials and guides related to these programs to get the most out of this free toolkit.

Note: Windows Live Essentials 2011 requires you to have a Vista service pack 2 or higher version of Windows. There are also some other system requirements that we mentioned at the end of this article.

How to install Windows Live Essentials 2011

So let’s get started with the installation. There are two ways to install this tool.

1. Use Windows Update

By now, Live essentials should have arrived as one of the automatic updates that Windows installs regularly on your computer. If you have your Windows updates set to automatically download and install, you probably have this program installed on your PC. You can check by going to the start search bar and typing Windows Live Essentials, Windows Mail, etc. If you find them there, that means you have it.

2. Use the Live Essentials website

Of course, you can download it from the Live Essentials site. And the good thing about doing it this way is that you can choose the products you want to install. In the case of installing through Windows updates, I found that it doesn’t let you choose and just install them all at once.

When you download and run the tool, you will get the following window.

It will then allow you to choose the programs you want to install. You can uncheck the ones you don’t need. If you have previous versions of any of these programs installed, the installer will update them.

Clicking install will start the process. It takes a few minutes to get everything up and running.

It’s about settings. Once done, you’ll find the products you selected in the “All Programs” list in your start menu.

What does Live Essentials 2011 include?

Now let’s talk about the different products in the Live Essentials 2011 series. It’s a great collection of real programs. Each serves a different and useful purpose in its own right. Let’s check them out.

Windows Live Messenger

Windows Live Messenger is an instant messaging tool that allows you to connect with people and chat with them online. It’s an advanced IM tool that combines social networking and HD (high definition) video chat. You can also share photos and videos while chatting,

send video messages

and do much more.

Windows Live Photo Gallery

Windows Live Photo Gallery 2011 is a powerful photo organizer that can help you easily import photos from all kinds of devices and then organize them efficiently. Edit photos, add different effects, create

slideshow

,

panorama photo

and movies out of them and quickly publish them on sites like Facebook and Flickr.

Windows video editing software

Windows Live Movie Maker, as the name suggests, helps you make movies. You can add your photos and videos and create a great movie complete with sound, special effects, captions, etc. Editing movies is also not difficult and sharing

your movie

on social sites like Facebook and YouTube is also an option.

Windows Live Grid

Windows Live Mesh 2011 is a useful tool

backup and sync

tool for Windows PCs that can sync important files and folders with your SkyDrive online account. You get 5 GB of free storage on SkyDrive, which is not much but enough to back up a large number of word documents, text files, and images.

Windows Live Writer

Let me start off by saying that I’m not a huge fan of the latest version of Live Writer included in Live Essentials 2011. As a longtime user of the tool (I’m writing this in Live Writer), I was expecting something better. Having said that, I would like to mention that there is no other tool that can match the capabilities and features of Windows Live Writer as an offline blog editor. So if you are a blogger and use Windows, this is a must have tool.

Windows Live Family Safety

Frequent readers of this site may remember that we explored Windows Live Family Safety in detail in our article.

parental controls In Windows 7 with activity reporting and web filtering

. The new Family Safety is almost the same, maybe with a better interface.

Windows Direct Mail

Windows Live Mail is a great tool for those who want to use a desktop email client but don’t have Outlook and don’t like Thunderbird. You can use this tool to manage

multiple email accounts

hold conversations and do more.

Outlook Connection Pack

The Outlook Connector package in Windows Live Essentials Suite includes a Hotmail connector for Outlook and a social connector for Live messenger. Things will be easier if you use your Hotmail/Windows Live email account as your primary email address.

Bing Bar

The Bing Bar is a toolbar for your browser that combines some of the key features of Bing, Microsoft’s premier search engine (and second most popular). It’s a must-have for people who prefer Bing over Google for their search needs.

Microsoft Silver Lamp

And finally, the Windows Live Essentials 2011 installer will also install Microsoft Silverlight, the foundation needed to run many web-based tools (mostly from Microsoft). It’s like Adobe Flash, which most of you know, is used to run web videos (most of them).

That’s what Microsoft’s Windows Live Essential 2011 suite offers. As mentioned earlier, we’ll be talking more about each of them in the coming weeks, so stay tuned!

link

Windows Live Essentials 2011

System Requirements for Windows Live Essentials 2011

Categories: How to
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