windows live essentials
Windows Live Essentials Review: Family Safety
November 22, 2009
For those over-protective parents out there, the final Windows Live Essentials application I’m taking a look at is Family Safety. Personally, it looks like more hassle than it’s worth, especially considering that Windows 7 and Windows Vista both have Parental Controls built in that work very well! If you use the Parental Control’s in Vista or 7, you can already stop the kids from using certain applications, going on the computer at certain times and applying a web filter.
Windows Live Essentials Review: Toolbar
November 21, 2009
Internet toolbars… I’ve never liked them, and always associate them with two words: useless and malware. So what makes Live Toolbar different? Well, apart from integration with every other Live application, not a lot. For some reason, Microsoft felt compelled to give you another search box to go along with the one you already have in the top corner of IE, which is utterly pointless and tends to get in the way a bit.
Another gripe I have is the fact that you need Internet Explorer to use the damn thing, which puts me off straight away – I much prefer Firefox or even Safari to Internet Explorer, and unfortunately for Microsoft, a toolbar isn’t going to change that!
Continue reading »Windows Live Essentials Review: Writer (Blogging Client)
November 20, 2009
If you run a blog of your own, you may will be interested to know that Windows Live Essentials ships with a very capable blog editor called Windows Live Writer. When you start Writer for the first time, you’ll need to set Writer up to publish to your blog, and that’s virtually any blog service you may use, not just Microsoft’s ‘Live Spaces’.
You can set it up to publish to Live Spaces, SharePoint and ‘Other blog service’ which includes Blogger and WordPress. Once you’ve selected whichever applies to you, just input the requested information and hit next. For a service like WordPress, you need your URL and username / password, whereas for a Windows service like spaces, you just need your Windows Live ID and Password.
Continue reading »Windows Live Essentials Review: Movie Maker
November 19, 2009
I’ve always liked Windows Movie Maker – a simple video editing application that was bundled with Windows XP, and at the time, very impressive. In the 5 year gap between the release of XP and Vista however, Windows Movie Maker started to show its age, and it’s re-appeared on the scene with Windows Live Essentials. If you’re using Windows XP, you won’t be able to download Movie Maker as part of the Live Essentials package – you need to be running either Windows Vista or Windows 7.
Previous versions of Movie Maker were very focused on movie making and only movie making (hence the name…) but the first thing I noticed is that there seems to be a shift in focus in the creation of Live Movie Maker. Most of the editing tools found in the older version of Movie Maker have been brought forward to the Live version and been given a face lift in the process. As with all the Windows Live Essentials applications from Microsoft, navigation is handled with the ‘Ribbon’ interface, which is much simpler than the GUI found in the old Movie Maker – everything seems much more organised and features are easier to find. When you’re in Movie Maker, you’ll find everything in 4 tabs.
Continue reading »Windows Live Essentials Review: Photo Gallery
November 18, 2009
Windows Live Photo Gallery is Microsoft’s photo editing application that comes as part of the Windows Live Essentials download and I must admit that I really like it. It features everything that the average consumer needs, covering everything from tagging someone on a photo to basic editing features such as red eye removal. What I like about Photo Gallery is the fact that it doesn’t try to be Photoshop, it’s good as a basic photo management application, and doesn’t overly complicate things – you don’t need to be a professional photographer to find your way around or make your photos look great.
When you view a folder of photos, they’re presented in a grid view, with a slider adjusting the size of the thumbnail previews. You can view your pictures in a few different ways, as you’d expect from any decent photo management application. Photos can be viewed by folder, the date that it was taken or by person, using the “People Tags” feature which I’ll come to in a bit… The pictures in your library can also be rotated clockwise or anti-clockwise and you can even export selected photos, either to a DVD or Live Movie Maker.
Continue reading »Windows Live Essentials Review: Mail
November 17, 2009
When you download Windows Live Essentials, you won’t find a calendar application or even an address book application. What you will find, however, is Windows Live Mail, which covers not only your e-mailing needs, but also comes with calendar and contacts functionality. To switch between Mail, Calendar and Contacts you can select which function you wish to use in the bottom left hand corner of the screen. If you open Calendar, it opens in the current window, but Contacts opens its own window, which I found a little strange and inconsistent.
The mail section of the application provides you with a consistent and familiar layout similar to other mail clients. On the left, you’re presented with a sidebar containing three categories: “Quick Views” where you can view all unread e-mail and feeds; all the mailboxes of the linked account and the “Outbox” section. You can also add another e-mail account from here, as well as select different functions from Mail, Calendar and Contacts.
Continue reading »Windows Live Essentials Review: Messenger
November 16, 2009
When I first installed Windows 7, it somehow felt incomplete without MSN Messenger waiting for me in the start menu. In fact, the first thing I did was download it as part of the Windows Live Essentials package from the Microsoft. If you’re not aware of it, Windows Live Essentials is a collection of applications including the ever popular Windows Live Messenger, Microsoft’s instant messaging application. Also included in the package are applications such as Live Mail, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker and Writer – all of which I’ve been running on Windows 7. I’ll review the package in several articles, starting with Messenger.
Compared to the Windows Messenger you can find within install of Windows XP, Windows Live Messenger is quite an advancement, having gone through many changes (and names) over the years. When you log in to your Windows Live account, you’re presented with a list of all your contacts, just like in previous versions, with a few visual refinements.
Continue reading »Windows Live Essentials Review – Introduction
November 15, 2009
What are Windows Live Essentials you might be asking? Well with the recent launch of Windows 7, we can see that Microsoft have really done many things right with the latest version of their operating system software, such as tweaking the existing code from Windows Vista to make it run a whole lot better on the same and lesser hardware specifications, however perhaps they’ve gone a little too far and they also took some software out!
Now I’m not so sure that Microsoft did the right thing in removing the bunch of programs from Windows 7 that now make up the Windows Live Essentials suite of applications, that you can then install separately into Windows 7 for free – now obviously they’ll be some people who would never actually use them if they were shipped as part of Windows 7, but what about all those people out there who receive their new computer and then only use the software that comes on it unless they specifically buy a new software application from a shop?
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