Windows Live Essentials will be the next iteration of Microsoft’s popular Windows Live applications suite. The first beta was released back in June (see Windows Live Essentials Beta Download), and several news sites were reporting that beta 2 would be released in this week. The day of the release has come, as download links went live a few hours ago.
The Liveside blog discovered all download links prior to the official announcement by Microsoft, which is expected to hit the official website later today.
Below are the web and full download links for all supported languages of the beta. As you can see, seven languages next to English are available: French, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese.
- English: Web – Full
- French: Web – Full
- German: Web – Full
- Dutch: Web – Full
- Portuguese (Brazilian): Web – Full
- Spanish: Web – Full
- Japanese: Web – Full
- Chinese (Simplified): Web – Full
The full installer comes at a size of about 151 Megabytes, the web installer is considerably smaller, but requires an Internet connection during setup to download additional program packages.
So what’s new in the new beta version of Windows Live Essentials?
This new version of the suite, incorporates new icons, new features, many bugs fixed since version Beta releases and what more important… The incorporation Windows Live Language Setting with all language packs (MUI) & (LIP) for example Catalan and Euskera for Spanish version.
This program brings new features like the ability to change languages or install (automatically for the web) the additional languages.
Additional information will become available once Microsoft announces the new beta version official on their Windows Live blog.
Update: The post is live, and it contains lots of information about the Windows Live Essentials 2011 Beta Refresh:
Performance and quality of service improvements
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.
Facebook chat in Messenger
Many of you have been asking for Facebook chat, and it’s finally here. More than half of all Messenger customers also use Facebook. With the previous beta, you got a rich social view that brought together all your updates (including those from Facebook) and gave you one place to see and comment on them. With the new Facebook chat integration, you now also have one place to chat with all your friends. And if you use Facebook but don’t use Messenger today, you now have an always-on “people app” on your PC that gives you instant access and notifications as people come online in Facebook or Messenger.
New Facebook chat integration
Connect to Facebook and Windows Live
Quick previews and improved tree view in Photo Gallery
One of the benefits of the new ribbon user interface in Windows Live Essentials is the ability it gives you to preview a change before you apply it simply by hovering over the option. With the beta update today, we’ve also added preview capabilities to the “Find” tab in the ribbon. So before you apply a filter (date, rating, people tags), you can hover over one of those filters and see the results instantly.
Flickr video publishing and Snapshot in Movie Maker
With the new Snapshot feature in Movie Maker, you can select a single frame from a video as it appears in the preview window and add it to your movie. This allows you to quickly grab an image that you want to keep or perhaps use for your movie’s intro or closing.
In addition, because we know many of you use Flickr for photo sharing and have enjoyed publishing to Flickr right from Photo Gallery, we’ve extended support to Movie Maker, so that you can now publish videos directly from Movie Maker or Photo Gallery to Flickr too.
Several of the improvements and new features improve the user experience a lot. Facebook chat integration will appeal to a lot of users, the new option to upload movies and photos to Flickr is plain awesome, the improvements in movie maker that now supports higher quality content, coupled with the increase in movie resolutions that can be uploaded to SkyDrive show that Microosft is on the right way.
We suggest to download the Windows Live Essentials Full installer which offers several advantages including the possibility to distribute it to several computer systems without having to download the program packages over and over again.
Have you tried the second beta of Windows Live Essentials? Let us know what you think of it in the comments.
Update: The beta releases are outdated and have been removed. You can download the latest Windows Live Essentials release from the official website now.
Related Articles:
Windows Live Essentials Beta DownloadWindows Live Essentials 2011 Released, Offline Installer Download
Windows Live Essentials 2011 beta 2 coming next week
Microsoft to Launch Windows Live Essentials 2011 later Today
Windows Live Movie Maker Updated
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good job MS! haha can you post a workaround for linux? with wine or crossover(which sucks…)
Still can’t use nicknames. Why the hell are they trying to force people use real names.
with Live messanger that is.
Great job! Just downloaded it. The new Beta essentials :D Great to know!
Martin, thank you! Your site is the only one I know of in existence that provides consistent update notices for applications which most users ignore or update checkers fail to check. Must be the “human” element.
Thanks Jasray, I’m trying my best to keep an eye on everything interesting that gets released.
After installing the most recent beta update, I now receive the error msg “The system cannot find the path specified” when trying to start movie maker. I uninstalled and reinstalled winlivebeta but still have the problem. All other essentials function ok.
Any assistance would be appreciated.
Don
@Don–The error message you receive is quite common, but after a quick google search no simple solution was found. I didn’t even think to check if my programs were working. Checked WMM Live just now, and it popped right open. What would I do? Most likely, I would uninstall all of the programs associated with the Live Beta using Revo, run a thorough registry cleaner, and check the environmental variables under right click my computer, properties, advanced settings. The default variables can be found with a google check. Maybe corrupt profile. Anyway, then reinstall the entire package.
@Martin–Thanks again for the Adobe Update information; no other site has a clue that it exists.
Thanks for responding jasray….
I followed your suggestions but the problem still persists.
Don
Was the first beta installed? If not, that may be part of the problem. Uninstall the second beta, install the first beta, reinstall the second beta.
Or enable the Hidden Administrator account and install from there:
Make sure to run the command prompt as Admin
net user administrator /active:yes
install
disable
net user administrator /active:no
Yes, I was running with first beta. I’ve tried everything that I can think of to resolve this problem. Have run as admin. Not sure what you mean by net user, etc…
Don
I am making the assumption that you are using Windows 7. W7 has an account called the Hidden Administrator. If a user runs the commands provided in the command prompt as Admin, then the account is no longer hidden. Upon re-boot another account will show called Administrator. Sometimes people find they can install software in the HA account which they couldn’t install with their user account even though they are the Administrator.
Other ideas: Install both ways. If you have been using the web installer, switch, etc.
Turn the firewall, antivirus, etc. off, install, and turn everything back on.
Thanks again jasray…
I’m using 64 bit win7. Not having a problem installing Essentials. They all install just fine and all run fine except for MM. I’ve tried installing from full 155mb package as well as the web package and still have the problem. Looks to me like a registry issue but regmechanic didn’t find anything. I also checked the file location and found everything normal there including the .exe file, dlls, etc.
Don
Frustration–Comodo System Cleaner (portable) works well for cleaning; not so sure that’s the problem. I guess one could simply uninstall WMML and re-install web version checking only WMML. If I find something later in the day, I shall post it.