Windows Live 4: Simplicity, Life and Productivity are on the Front Stage

Microsoft has unveiled the Windows Live wave 4 beta to its users. With this beta comes many improvements along with disappointments that will surely be the focus of the mind who needs the job done his/her way. None-the-less, this beta reveals the new framework of the future of photo editing and sharing, communication, and movie making.

Simplicity

Windows Live is by far the simplest set of software out there. While critics would say that it is as simple as it is because it is missing features, one can easily find that the Windows Live suite, unlike others that are out there, carries a clean and organized design along with an interface that is more focused for visual people that want their tools in front of them, rather than the old way where all of the features and tools that are needed are hidden within menus and the memorization of shortcut keys was vital – as is the case with Apple’s iMovie.

For instance, the new ribbon interface – which was first introduced with Microsoft Office 2007, and becoming the theme of Windows 7, Microsoft’s most current and most accomplished operating system, makes finding the necessary tools easy to find.

Windows Live Movie Maker, for example, has all of the simplest and most frequently used tasks on the Home tab while reserving the transitions and special effects, along with other features conveniently concealed in other tabs that is just as easy to find and use.

Photo Gallery places all of the social networking related tools and the most frequently used tools on the Home tab and again reserves tabs behind it for specific tasks such as editing, creating or finding. On the Home tab, Microsoft has added a bar where faces will appear. Clicking these faces draws up all of the pictures of that person based on how you tagged your pictures.

Social Networking

The first noticeable ability in Windows Live that is unique in comparison to many of its rivals is the ability to share and synchronize life from one point to another quickly and easily. For instance, upon opening Windows Live Photo Gallery and Windows Live Movie Maker, one will instantly see the following icons.

If these icons are not familiar, the first one is Skydrive, the Windows Live backup and sharing utility that now supplies Office Web Applications which are convenient for working on the go. The second is Facebook, one of the largest social networking sites in the world, it is the place where people can get lost in their online “friends” and stay connected through multimedia means along with status updates. The third is YouTube, a popular video hosting site that allows people to have a voice. The fourth icon is that of Flikr, a popular photo hosting site which allows us to avoid using the mail for long distance photo relaying. The final icon belongs to windows live groups, a way to group people of common interest or common goal.

Users of these networking sites, and many others through add-ons which are free and downloadable, can easily synchronize their lives in one place. Instead of opening the browser and going to each of the sites individually, a user is able to upload the pictures from their albums on their very desktops. Should the photo need quick touch ups, just flip the tab.

In Movie Maker, this ability is especially useful for uploading videos and is the only software that doesn’t require any knowledge what-so-ever to be able to upload a video onto any social networking site, or save it to use on a computer, mobile device or directly to the big screen using a DVD.

Windows Live Messenger, the client that provides people with easy access to their friends and family through chatting and video calling, and even file sharing has gotten a make over. It is now able to connect Windows Live Messenger to your social networks and be updated in Live Messenger and act on things from Messenger without leaving the application. If your best friend is getting married and announces it on Facebook via a wall post, you can comment on the wall post from Windows Live Messenger directly. If you have something to announce, writing it, or sharing a picture, in the quotation box next to your profile picture in messenger will synchronize everything you placed into that quotation with the other social networks so that you can say your message once, and only once.The equivalent applies to a post being made in Facebook, Windows Live will automatically update your status in Windows Live.

The Improvements

Windows Live is capable to synchronize with almost any social networking site and is easily customizable from Video effects to plug ins, the potential for possibility is strong.

With a simple and well organized interface, a little can make a lot more. In Apple’s iMovie, there are countless ways to make and enhance a movie, although, due to poor organization and hidden tools, the job got more difficult and demanded other software to do the simplest of tasks because it was too complex to handle them. Windows Live Movie Maker has been criticized for its lack of features, however, when making a movie in Windows Live Movie Maker, despite limitations, the film gets done quickly, easily and even beautifully.

The entire suite has more features that will simplify and enhance day to day and once in a life time tasks, with its easy customization, and the ability to customize it, along with the openness from Microsoft to, this basic piece of software can be the software that works the wonders that the most complex and complete software can’t.

The Disappointments

In Skype, if one person didn’t have a webcam, the conversation wouldn’t end, one side would see a person, the other wouldn’t, but the quality of the computer phone call would not deteriorate, nor would it refuse to function. Microsoft’s decision to take away the Show webcam feature in Windows Live Messenger was grounded, but only on the condition that video call would adapt to the surroundings. In Skype, a person would start a voice call and add video as they go along and video would not be required. Maybe, instead of having a video call option and a voice call option, there should be one call option – like in Skype – where if a person wants to show a web cam, they are able to without requiring the other person to activate or acquire a web cam. as a result, the people who would make video calls to see their loved ones but don’ have a web cam are left without the sight at all.

With the move toward a one stop place for all social needs, Microsoft has dropped the ability to place a nickname when in Windows Live. This could be due to synchronization issues, but the personalization and nick names we use online were a form of expression and personality. While this isn’t going to sting for long, it is possible that some people will be stunned to see their nickname disappear and be unable to stop it.

While Windows Live Messenger will supply all the updates from you and your friends, allow you to watch their videos and comment on their pictures without entering any information or leaving the window, shockingly, the contacts in the Facebook section of the chat engine in Windows Live doesn’t recognize when the contacts on Facebook are online in Facebook, but instead requires your contacts to be online in Windows Live. It would be nice if the Facebook section of the Windows Live Messenger contacts list was occupied by the people ho are online in Facebook, and not just on live.

While the idea is there, watching videos in windows live messenger’s social section produces an error, it shouldn’t be long until it is resolved.

Overall

Windows Live Essentials wave 4 beta is a major improvement to its predecessor. Windows Live Movie Maker, for instance, has gained many of the features that was lost since Vista’s Movie Maker 6.0. Many new features were added and the overall organization is flawless. While not all of the programs were featured in this review, there has been a significant amount of change and the ribbon UI basically rearranges as well as adds functionality to your old applications. This beta version is worth upgrading to. While some testers have experienced bugs, the experience that I have had so far has been smooth and fluent, and the only issues were the features that had potential and flopped – hopefully for now. Despite its minor flaws, Windows Live provides easy and convenient tools to use to get your life in order and make the most of your digital media. While Microsoft’s main rival has shown to have a movie maker that is more complete, its complexity makes it harder for the average person to use, and its lack of the simplest features make life inconvenient as users have to constantly switch back and forth and search through numerous and long menus of options that when looking for one specific feature makes the software seem useless and bloated. Windows Live offers basic and customizable software that even in its simple state can compete with its rivals and with its unique organization, can be much more productive than its complete and somewhat disorganized rivals.

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Setting up Bell Sympatico in Windows Live Mail

If you have Bell internet and you use their free email account, the task gets trickier as Bell has built in safeguards that need to be taken into account.

If you are running Avast Antivirus, this program will be useless to send emails unless you turn off the scan for out going mail – which is redundant anyway.

To begin, click Add email account on the left hand side bar.

 

Then, you enter your email address and password and display name. Make sure that the Manually configure server settings for email account is checked. Click next upon termination.

Then, you need to fill in some information that you can find at bell.ca, but rather than get the information there, this tutorial would be useless if it required leaving the page.

The things that you need to fill in are as follows:

My Incoming Mail Server is a POP3 server.

The incoming server is: pophm.sympatico.ca at port 995

The server must always have a secure SSL connection.

The login ID is your email address, insert it in the space.

The Outgoing server is: smtphm.sympatico.ca at port 25.

The server needs authentication and as always, SSL secure connection.

Once this is filled in, click next.

Click Finish.

The job isn’t over yet, now we need to modify some settings.

Right click the account and click properties.

Make a quick rally through the tabs and make sure that the appropriate information is inserted in the properties – this is the reason for many of the send and receive errors.

Go to the Advanced Tab and set the Server Timeouts to Long.

Click Ok.

Now, the account is set up and you are ready to go.

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Setting up Hotmail in Windows Live Mail

Setting up a hotmail or live account in windows live mail is very easy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

First, you click Add email account on the left hand side bar.

Then, you enter your email address and password and display name. Click next upon termination.

Click Finish.

Leave it to Microsoft to make a 3 step email adding scheme for hotmail.

Windows Live Mail will synchronize itself with your online data and emails, so if you have been using hotmail for a long time and store your messages there, you will have to wait as it downloads everything to ensure that it is a completely synchronized clone to the online version.

After sending a test email to another account, Windows Live Hotmail will not require any manual tweaks. If you have hotmail, Windows Live Mail might be your best bet since it is simple, fast and requires no work what-so-ever.

To delete the account, simply right click the account and click Remove account.

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Do you have a new computer and have no clue how to secure it? Or is it that your current antivirus is about to expire and you have no money to buy a new license? Microsoft has released a free antivirus that is very light on the system and is surprisingly better than bought versions of other antivirus software. Microsoft Security Essentials is a free download and is available for all Genuine Windows operating systems that are newer than Windows XP. It runs on your computer without using much of your performance and doesn’t disturb you like most other antivirus software will. Its installation is 10 minutes and performs a quick scan on the spot which takes between 10 and 15 minutes.
This software will work on Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 on the condition that it is genuine. To download Security Essentials and experience free and silent protection that you can feel comfortable about, you can download and install the security suite directly from Microsoft at: http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/. Remember to always save downloading files and scan them before using them – regardless of where they are from. If you want to see how this software will protect and impress you, read on in this full featured review and tutorial.
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Silent Security That is Dependable

Overview

Microsoft Security Essentials has a very simple interface and is extremely easy to use. To perform a scan, open the program and all of the options are on the first page. A quick scan will quickly scan the most targeted areas on your computer for viruses in under 20 minutes. The full scan will scan your entire system and any externally connected drives or devices. The custom scan will ask you to choose the folders to scan and proceed with the same steps as the full scan. Microsoft Security Essentials can also perform updates before scheduled scans and will use Windows Update to update its data base and kernel.
To update or upgrade the program manually, you simply go to the update tab and click update. This software also blocks pages and downloads that are infected with malware from proceeding. However, one must always use caution when browsing the web regardless of their antivirus and use intelligence when making a decision upon proceeding. All of the malware that is cleaned off your computer will be stored in the History tab. This includes all prevented intrusions from malware from the web.This part of the program will also explain to you what the virus does and how dangerous it is.
Microsoft Security Essentials is easily programmable to scan and update and perform many other tasks at your demand. While it doesn’t have that convenient maintenance tool that its predecessor One Care had which fine tuned your computer by cleaning the hard drive and fixing errors, Windows already provides these tools and it wouldn't be surprising if One Care’s maintenance window was just a fancy display making it look like it’s using its own tools when it was using the ones that were already installed in windows in reality.
Security Essentials will perform actions automatically upon finding a virus. It will tell you that there is a virus and prompt you to click Clean Computer where it will clean the computer automatically. Microsoft is automatically set to remove any viruses but if you want to override that decision, you can make those changes in the Default Actions section.
Real-time Protection is a very handy part of Security Essentials. On first glance, it may seem that this software is a rip off in comparison to other antivirus software but this built in feature is very powerful and has been a life saver on several occasions. Microsoft Security Essentials is so silent in its actions that some may even wonder if it works but it does. Note that disabling the Real-Time Protection feature will make Security Essentials go from Protected to not protected and it will prompt you to click “Start Now” which will reactivate the Real-Time Protection Feature.For optimal performance, make sure that the Real-Time Protection feature is enabled along as its tasks being to Monitor activity and scan all downloaded files for this is the engine that blocks the majority of the viruses before they are detected in the full system scan.
Security essentials can even exclude file locations and types to speed up the process of scans. Although, its current scan engine will not even be noticed on the system specifications and your computer doesn’t lag while it scans.
While this is a very basic security program that is meant to replace Windows Defender which was an anti-spyware program built into Windows Vista and released for Windows XP, it adds very important coverage on the front of defense. You can have this program scan all removable drives, scan all compressed media and even create a system restore point at each scan which is handy if ever your computer gets corrupted by another task. For instance, if you were one of the ones that saw a beta version of a program that has been leaked and got curious, eventually, you would find that its limited functionality was frustrating and that its uninstaller was non-existent. in the end, the old version wouldn’t install properly due to registry errors and you would be forced to clean the registry which is never a good idea. So, Windows System Restore is the place to go. Once started, it will take approximately half an hour to take your computer back to that virus scan that occurred just before your curiosity peaked.
Microsoft even has a security community called SpyNet where you can join and aid them in the fight against viruses. Based on what I have seen, this engine is a success. Microsoft Security Essentials has detected things that my previous Norton and Avast anti-virus software didn’t even detect. Unlike Avast, there are no false positives since Security Essentials is intelligent enough to figure out what a windows system file is, and if it didn’t this product would be a complete failure.
Another great feature in Security Essentials is the right-click scan. You can right-click any file or folder on your computer and the scan option will be available. This is great for inspecting the files that you recently downloaded for viruses and malware. At the end of the scan, you will receive a scan report as shown in the second image. The scan was so fast that a screen capture of the scanning was impossible.

Security Essentials will even work in a weaker environment. A virtual machine in Microsoft Virtual Machine 2007 has a Pentium 3 processor at 1mhz per second and in this case, a ram of about 800MB. Unless the use hardware virtualization option is on, there is no graphics in the machine which is especially noticeable in Windows Vista and Windows 7 where AREO absolutely needs a graphics card to have full functionality. However, if a weak virtual machine can scan a 15mb file in less than a second, on a good computer, the performance is phenomenal.
If you don’t run a scan in a while because the automatic scan cannot take place due to the computer never being on, you will get a message.

Upon clicking scan now, you will see the standard scanning screen as it checks your system for unwanted malware.

If a virus is detected during the scan, as in the case of this dummy test virtual machine, it will display an advisory at the bottom of the scan. In this shot, we can see that a scan of the full Windows 7 virtual machine build will be scanned in under 15 minutes on a virtual machine. The hard drive in this machine is 15 GB where only 12 GB is used. On a 250GB hard drive with the full processor speed, the time to scan is roughly 11 minutes.
Once the scan is finished, you will be prompted to clean the computer.
If you click Show Details, you will see this Window.
It seems that Keygens are a good source of Malware, that virus on the desktop was easily detected and will be easily removed.You can click show details for a description and recommended procedure of action. Unless, you have plans for this virus, click clean computer.

You could just as easily have clicked clean computer -  the big button – but I always like to know what the virus was.
You will see that your computer is safe when this window appears. Microsoft easily and quickly dealt with the problem.

Now that the computer is clean, here is the scan report.

Real-Time Protection – Stay Safe While Doing Nothing About It; You’re Covered

To test Real-Time Protection, several emails have been circulating on Facebook about videos and photos that don’t exist. We know that they are viruses, but will Security Essentials respond?
I entered the bit.ly link and now i get this phony video page from lincolnval.com and in a matter of a second, it is blocked.
Here is Security Essentials telling me how dangerous it is… Note that no siren was used and no sound was made.
Hit Clean Computer and Microsoft does its work… It is wise to close the web site.

The computer is now clean again.
So, Microsoft Security Essentials is sure to impress as it protects you against threats that other security software claim to but don’t. For future reference, as with my previous post, don’t trust links that have been shortened. Lincolnval is no video sharing site.
This software will work on Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 on the condition that it is genuine. To download Security Essentials and experience free and silent protection that you can feel comfortable about, you can download and install the security suite directly from Microsoft at: http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/. Remember to always save downloading files and scan them before using them – regardless of where they are from.
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Skydrive, The Tool You Already Have and Don’t Know About

Windows Live Skydrive is a very handy tool from Microsoft that anyone can use – provided that their email account works in windows live. It is a storage space of 20GB with many added features such as the ability to create and edit Office documents with the new Office Live Web Apps or share pictures and videos with friends. The user interface of Skydrive is very simple and straight forward to use.
Newer versions of hotmail and Windows Live Mail clients will automatically upload and transfer the pictures and videos to your friends for you – at least, that’s the bold claim.

If you want to see the part where they talk about using skydrive, skip to 2:15.

But, in the meantime, to share photos, documents, and videos in skydrive, create a new folder in the skydrive, edit the permissions and add the emails of the people with whom you want to share the files and that’s it.
Here is a step by step.
First, go to Skydrive and sign in with the account that you use to access windows live messenger, casually known as msn.
Then, once signed in, you click New, then Folder.

Once in the New Folder dialog, name the folder and underneath is a (Share with:), click Change.


Then Adjust Your Settings, or Add specific people by typing their name or email address in the space provided.


Note: For the privacy of my contacts, I typed a name that doesn’t exist, when you type the name of your actual contact, a list will appear underneath where you’re writing and you click the name that you wish to select.
After hitting next, you are prompted to add files. This is when you drag and drop all of your pictures, videos and documents into this area and watch it all upload.


 
 

That’s all there is to it. Click on the file and you will be able to use it, or take the hyperlink of the file or folder and send it to one of the friends with whom you shared pictures, videos and documents.
Now, let’s watch that video in skydrive…
 

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