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Windows Rolls out Live Essentials

Posted 01/08/09 at 01:29:51 AM  by Alex Castle

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At tonight's CES Microsoft keynote speech, Steve Ballmer talked a lot about the shape of things to come in the Windows community. Fortunately, he also made a couple announcements that are about the here and now. One such announcement was that Windows Live Essentials, a suite of free, fundamental communications software for Windows is out of beta.

The  suite includes Messenger, an email utility, photo management software, and Writer, a blogging program. Movie Maker is also available for free, though it is technically still a beta release. The programs can be downloaded for free here (although something tells us most of our Maximum PC readers already have favorite programs that accomplish the Essential tasks), and will come pre-installed on most Dell PCs. 

Additionally, Windows Live Essentials can integrate with certain "web activities" such as Facebook, allowing you to synchronize data on those services with data on your home computer.

So, what does everyone think of Windows Live Essentials? Is this the start of a iLife-esque unified Windows experience, or is it not enough? Hit the break and leave us a comment.

 

 

COMMENTS:5
TAGS: windows, microsoft, Windows Live, CES2009, Windows Live Essentials
COMMENTS
avatarthis coudl be why windows 7

Submitted by DoctorX on Sat, 01/17/2009 - 12:28pm

this coudl be why windows 7 runs so much faster ;)

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avatar(Yawn)....

Submitted by Shalbatana on Thu, 01/08/2009 - 9:05pm

Please give us more things we already have tightly integrated and over the internet.

 

How about an upgrade to the capabilities to windows movie maker that would put it on par with iMovie from...5 years ago? Now that would be substantial.

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avatarIs this the Live essentials that was promised with Vista?

Submitted by ghot on Thu, 01/08/2009 - 8:13pm

Oh MS how can you sleep at night?  Gee golly whiz   ........Movie maker...lemme check real fast....oh yeah, that came with XP.  Oh, my bad, ALL of those Windows Live things came with XP, but now MS has named them essential....my sides are hurting, please stop joking MS, there are tears in my eyes.

I guess this COULD be construed as MS admitting that XP rox....lol....no matter...I'm still a Windows fan, even MS has severly abused my faith in them....maybe Windows EIGHT will be decent  :/

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avatar.

Submitted by Vano on Thu, 01/08/2009 - 7:04am

If you don't mind being forced upgrading previously installed version to the new one when you try install something else, then sure, it's probably not a bad thing...

Having WLM and Photo Gallery installed, I've tried install only new Photo Gallery, but it wouldn't let me without upgrading to the idiotic looking new WLM. But the fun part was when I had "final" versions of  these both applications and tried install something else a beta version and the installer "upgraded" all my final versions to the new beta versions without letting me to choose if I wanted it to or not.

 Here is my question to the MS Live! developers: WHAT THE F. ARE YOU SMOKING THERE?

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avatarsounds like it sux

Submitted by gsxrmike04 on Thu, 01/08/2009 - 5:32am

sounds like it sux

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