Windows Live Essentials 2011 has a new beta release, and it’s got a lot of changes for Windows Live Messenger—the biggest of which might be Facebook chat support.
The new release has all the usual good stuff, faster, better, bugs fixed, etc.
There’s also a lot of other changes to the release, including:
- A quicker Messenger – The time it takes to sign in, and to refresh contacts and social feeds, as well as animation speed, are all faster than in previous versions of Messenger.
- More efficient video chat – Messenger video chat uses 30% fewer CPU resources by offloading work to the GPU.
- Better facial recognition – Photo Gallery facial recognition is improved significantly and works more quickly.
- Larger movie uploads – Movie Maker will upload higher resolution movies to SkyDrive (480×640 vs. the previous 320×480).
- Higher bit-rate movies – Movie Maker now supports higher quality (bit-rate) content.
- Better spell-checking – Writer has significantly improved the quality of its spell-checking.
- Better integration with Office – Writer is much better at retaining all formatting when you copy and paste from Word and other Microsoft Office programs.
- Better handling of Gmail – Mail now automatically handles Gmail’s spam and trash folders properly.
- Faster web filtering – Family Safety web filtering is 35% faster than in the previous version.
Windows Live Essentials Beta [via Inside Windows Live]
Anytime you work online, you risk productivity wipeout. With a world at your fingertips it’s hard to stop from clicking on links (upon links, upon links). Avoid throwing away your precious time by making every click of the mouse a purposeful one.
SyncToy is a great tool to help you keep your files and folders synced between drives and devices. Here’s how you can make it do sync automatically so your files will stay synced even if you forget to sync them.
The zip format is the standard for file compression, however many power user and system admin types prefer to use the 7z format because it offers significantly better compression ratios. The zip format does have a few things going for it such as speed (relative to other compression formats) and
With about 35 CPU-years of idle computer time donated by Google, a team of researchers has essentially solved every position of the Rubik’s Cube™, and shown that no position requires more than twenty moves.
If you have been wanting something that sets a mood with a good dose of attitude for your desktop, then look through our collection of Batman wallpapers, icon packs, and fonts.
Would you like to customize your favorite websites with popular Greasemonkey scripts? Here’s how you can use any user script in Google Chrome with only 3 clicks.
As an American Express cardholder, I use it for just about everything, but sadly their website has only allowed 8 character passwords—until now.
One of the cool things about Windows Home server is the ability to access files remotely. Here we look at basic access to data while on the go from your iPhone or iPod Touch without installing additional apps.
Everybody’s got that one family member on Facebook that you just don’t want to talk to, but they bug you every time you sign into Facebook chat anyway—here’s how to sign on without them seeing you.
Want to check out the latest version of Firefox, Chromium or VLC without dealing with enabling new software repositories? Try out Kompozer or Audacity without installing a bunch of dependencies? PortableLinuxApps to the rescue.
Windows Live Essentials 2011 has a new beta release, and it’s got a lot of changes for Windows Live Messenger—the biggest of which might be Facebook chat support.