Windows Live Essentials 2011

No word from Microsoft, but It's out!

Do more with Windows on your PC with free programs from Microsoft for photos, movies, instant messaging, email, social networking, and more. Get it all in one simple download.

Messenger - Stay in touch with the people you care about most from your PC, phone, or the web. Share photos and videos as you chat, and see the latest updates from your friends.

Photo Gallery - Get great tools for organizing, touching up, and sharing your photos and videos. Create stunning panoramas, movies, and slide shows, and publish them online.

Movie Maker - Turn your photos and videos into polished movies that are easy to share. Add special effects, transitions, sound, and captions to help tell your story in style.

Mail - Efficiently manage multiple email accounts, calendars, and your contacts—even when you're offline. Plus, use a great tool for sharing lots of photos in email without filling up anyone's inbox.

Also included in Windows Live Essentials - Writer, Family Safety, Windows Live Mesh, Messenger Companion, Bing Bar Outlook Connector Pack, Microsoft Silverlight.

Microsoft announces the final release of Windows Live Essentials 2011:

We are pleased to announce that Windows Live Essentials 2011 for Windows 7 and Windows Vista is now available for download! (Releasing in 48 languages over the next few hours, so if your language is not yet available, it will be very soon.) Windows Live Essentials 2011 was designed and built to connect your PC to the services you use every day. We’re also announcing today that Dell will be the first global PC manufacturer to ship PCs with Windows Live Essentials 2011 and Windows 7 pre-installed, just in time for your holiday purchases. Many other PC manufacturers are also planning to make Windows Live Essentials 2011 available and we’ll continue to keep you updated as they start releasing.

I want to offer a special thank you to the millions of people who installed the beta! Our beta users helped us identify and address issues, with over two thousand forum posts and comments. In today’s release, we’ve addressed 95% of all bugs reported by beta users, leading to improvements that you’ll see across the suite.

Download it today!

Get started and download Windows Live Essentials 2011 today. It is being released in 48 languages over the next few hours, so if you don’t see it in your language yet, you should see it very soon. If you’re running Windows Vista or Windows 7 on your PC, make sure you have the latest Windows updates installed before you install Windows Live Essentials (see the system requirements here). If your computer is still running Windows XP, you can, of course, continue to use the current Windows Live Essentials software, and then switch to Windows Live Essentials 2011 when you buy a new PC or upgrade to Windows 7.

Discuss this Article 7

modyvishal
on Sep 30, 2010
Hi Paul, I installed Live Essentials 2011 on one of my Win 7 machines and can't find any way to use the new Live Mesh to sync documents between XP and Vista/Win7. Do you know if there is a way to do this? Thanks
gavers
on Sep 30, 2010
Do you know if Messenger still no longer offers a way to block people or see who has you on their contact list? When they changed this it was a deal breaker -- spam is out of control on Messenger and since I talk to very few people it was easier to find other ways to talk to them than deal with the constant spam.
Backup77
on Sep 30, 2010
Good stuff Paul, installing now.
Grannyville
on Sep 30, 2010
Downloaded and installed. I was very impressed with the quality of the betas that were published. I'll get to the rest of my PCs updated when I can. Also, played Halo: Reach. Was not that impressed with it, to be honest. Very disappointed with it.
Dr. Daniel Jackson
on Sep 30, 2010
I think iLife should be released like this, WLE 2011 is high quality software for free, you can't beat that.
Victek
on Oct 1, 2010
Yes, this is great software. The only criticism I would throw at the Mail program is it no longer supports indenting the original text of messages when replying in newsgroups. The Wave 3 Mail program had this feature so who knows why it was cut...? One serious problem from Wave 3 was fixed, i.e. the faded subject headers of "read" messages. These could be very hard to read depending on monitor settings (and eyeball settings). Thankfully read messages remain black now (only the bold attribute is removed).
Grannyville
on Oct 1, 2010
Am I the only person who missed the Live Mesh Desktop back in the day? It was so useful whenever I was in university and I needed to access a file but I didn't have my laptop with me.

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