Click the start orb in the Windows taskbar and type in programs and features in the search form, or click on Control Panel and then Programs and Features. This displays a list of installed programs. Locate Windows Live Essentials, right-click it and selected Uninstall / Change from the program list.

Why Windows Live Essentials (or the recent Windows Live Essentials 2011 which is currently the latest iteration of the messenger) and not Windows Live Messenger? Because Windows Live Messenger is part of Live Essentials.

The click on Uninstall / Remove spawns the uninstall or repair Windows Live programs window. Select remove one or more Windows Live programs.

This displays a list of all Windows Live programs that are installed on the computer system. Place a checkmark in Messenger, which is Windows live Messenger and click the Uninstall button afterwards.

This displays a uninstalling programs progress window. Press close once the operation is finished. This should have removed Windows Live Messenger from the system.

There are however cases where users report that they cannot uninstall Windows Live Messenger using the Windows Live uninstaller.

Those users can download the free program WLMUninstaller to try and remove Windows Live Messenger or MSN Messenger from a computer. The program has not been updated for a while, and it may be that it does not work anymore with Windows Live Messenger 2011. This should therefor only be used as a last resort if the standard uninstallation of Windows Live Messenger does not complete successfully.

Windows Live Essentials is commonly called just that, essential for Windows users.  The latest version will not run on Windows XP because it takes advantage of hardware graphic acceleration that was introduced with Windows Vista.It includes old favourites such as Windows Live Messenger, which has also today been confirmed for Windows Phone 7, and utterly indispensable programs such as Live Photo Gallery, Live Writer and Windows Live Mail.

When it becomes available properly you will be able to download it at http://download.live.com

The last beta-refresh of the suite was a month and a half ago, on August 17th and the beta was first released to the public on June 24th.

The new suite takes full advantage of the ribbon interface originally seen in Microsoft office 2007 but now also implemented into Windows 7 features such as Wordpad and Paint.

New programs in the Live Essentials 2011 suite include Live Mesh (formerly Live Sync) that allows you to automatically synchronise files and folders across multiple PCs and better tools to help integrate Windows Live messenger into other programs such as Microsoft Outlook.

The main goals of the project were to offer Windows Live Sync users with options to synchronize files to PCs and the Cloud, to offer easy access to PCs and document collaboration using SkyDrive.

Less than two months later Microsoft made the decision to change the Windows Live Sync Beta name once again. The product has been renamed to Windows Live Mesh, apparently because of the feature additions remote access and cloud storage, which extend the program beyond synchronization.

Microsoft fortunately did more than just rebrand the product. Two feature enhancements have been added to the syncing capabilities. First, hidden files and folders can now be synced with Windows Live Mesh, something that the previous version was not capable of doing.

Second, Windows Live Mesh now displays the missing files in a folder, displaying the file names, last modification devices and dates they have been modified.

windows live mesh

Additional cloud storage has been added. Beta participants of Windows Live Sync received 2 Gigabytes of cloud storage. Only 2% of those users have been using more than 1.5 Gigabytes of space, which usually is a good indicator that the space limits are sufficient for the majority of users.

Microsoft still increased the storage limit from 2 to 5 Gigabytes for all users of Windows Live Mesh. And that is on top of the 25 Gigabytes offered by Live SkyDrive, as the two online storage systems are independent of each other – for now.

Finally, performance has been improved in Windows Live Mesh according to Microsoft. “We worked on cutting the application load time in half ” says Allison O’Mahony, Principal Program Manager Lead, Devices & Roaming. She continues by stating that Microsoft have “optimized both memory and CPU usage during sync activity as well as decreased CPU consumption by as much as 30% when Windows Live Mesh is idle”.

Windows Live Mesh is part of Windows Live Essentials beta, which can be downloaded from the official website. Windows Live Essentials Beta is not available for Windows XP, only for 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2. (via Caschy)

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.

Syncing refers to the process of making sure that files are available on all connected computer systems, and Windows Live Sync is one of the software programs to achieve this goal.

Windows Live Sync is part of Microsoft’s Windows Live software suite. A Windows Live account is needed to use the program, users without one can create a free account easily at the Windows Live website.

The Windows Live Sync software is available on that website, for Windows and Mac systems actually, as well. The software needs to be installed on every system that needs to be included in the synchronization process.

The program places an icon in the system tray after installation which contains links to settings and preferences. Start with a left-click on the icon and the selection of Sync Website.

This opens the Windows Live Sync website with options to configure personal and shared folders. Personal folders are only accessible by the user account creating them while shared folders can be shared with Windows Live friends.

windows live sync

All folders of linked computers can be selected for synchronization. It is for instance possible to select the documents folder to be synced with all other computers, the Firefox or Thunderbird profile, Outlook emails or anything else that is stored in folders.

windows live sync personal folders

Each personal or shared folder that is added this way is displayed on the Windows Live Sync startup screen along with the different computer systems configured to sync those selected folders.

The selected folders can be configured individually to either synchronize the folders automatically whenever the PC has an online connection and Windows Live Sync is running or on-demand which will only synchronize the data if it is accessed by a user.

Windows Live Sync has several limitations. It is for instance not recommended to sync data that is in use on more than one computer system as it can lead to sync errors and other problems.

Windows Vista and Windows 7 users have the option to download Windows Live Essentials Sync Beta instead which offers several additional features including storing data on Windows Live SkyDrive to access the data from web browsers. It has to be noted that this version of Sync is available as a beta, and therefor not suited for productive environments without proper testing.

The main benefit of Windows Live Sync is that it is easy to use. It takes only a few clicks to configure the whole syncing process. The synchronization should work out of the box on most computer systems, the settings of the program contain options to test the ports that are needed to sync the data.

Only the Web Setup installer is offered on the site. The setup routine on the local system downloads and installs the different programs automatically upon execution.

windows live essentials beta

Two different clients are offered on the Explore Live website. The first wlsetup-webd.exe will automatically download and install the Windows Live Essential applications, the second wlsetup-webc.exe offers a selection menu to install only specific applications as part of the Windows Live Essentials suite.

windows live essentials programs

The available programs are:

Messenger
Writer
Family Safety
Outlook Connector Pack
Photo Gallery and Movie Maker
Sync
Messenger Companion
Mail
Bing Bar
Microsoft Silverlight

It is recommended to download the second client to prevent the installation of programs that are not needed (by clicking on Choose the programs you want and selecting a language)

This beta release of windows Live Essentials is focusing on two things: Connecting Windows to the cloud and making everyday tasks simpler.

We’ve designed Essentials to connect your Windows experience to the web services you already use – not just the ones from Microsoft. The new betas of Windows Live Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Mail, Writer, and Messenger connect to photo and video sharing (SkyDrive, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, SmugMug), social networking (Facebook, MySpace, Linkedin), email (Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail), blogging (Spaces, WordPress, Blogger), and document productivity (Office Web Apps) services. And the new Windows Live Sync keeps your files synchronized across multiple PCs and in the cloud. You can even directly access your PC over the web with Sync’s new remote desktop feature.

People like to get creative on their PCs as much as they like seeing what everyone else has been up to. Whether it’s Retouch, Panoramic Stitch, or Photo Fuse in Photo Gallery, Auto Movie in Movie Maker, or photo email in the new Windows Live Mail, we think you’ll be excited by the new additions to Essentials that make advanced tasks, well, easy. If you haven’t yet tried PhotoFuse to merge together the best of several photos, it’s a lot of fun.

Windows Live Essentials is only compatible with Windows Vista and Windows 7 but not the widely used Windows XP operating system. Windows Live users need to make sure to follow this link to the beta page over at the Windows Live website to be able to download the beta installation clients. No direct link is provided on the Windows live page.

The updated Windows Live Movie Maker is part of Windows Live Essentials and can therefor be downloaded by downloading the Windows Live Essentials installer from the Microsoft website. Microsoft’s main focus was to make the Windows Live Movie Maker as easy to use as possible. One of the project manager demonstrates that it is possible to create a movie that includes photos, video clips and a sound track in less than 30 seconds.

Microsoft has added new features to polish movies that are created in Windows Live Movie Maker. This includes more transitions, effects and video editing features. A total of 60 transitions, 18 pan and zoom options and 20 visual effects are available in the latest version. Video sharing and has also been made easier. The new version of Windows Live Movie Maker features an import to Youtube link right in the main menu. It is also possible to publish to Facebook and Microsoft promises to add other popular services later on as plugins.

Videos can also be burned directly to DVD or saved in high definition format to be played on computer systems and high definition TVs or low definition formats for mobile devices and email. Windows 7 users do get some extra features like increased capabilities for creating HD movies and additional file format support.

Windows Live Movie Maker offers an easy way to create movies in Windows Vista and Windows 7.

The reason why Windows Live Movie Maker is not available for Windows XP:

You’d like to use Windows Live Movie Maker on Windows XP. Given the technical requirements, unfortunately we won’t be able to support Windows XP at this time. But Windows Movie Maker 2.1 for Windows XP is still a great option if you’re still using Windows XP. As we mentioned in our initial post about Windows Live Movie Maker last October, we’ve built a new engine for Movie Maker that makes use of some of the latest and greatest technologies available on the Windows platform. Introduced in Windows Vista (and supported in Windows 7) is a new graphics driver model, which brings more reliable and stable support for high-end graphics. We’ve also built our new engine on top of DirectX, which improves speed and enables even more advanced capabilities over time. Finally, we’ve also built Windows Live Movie Maker on top of the new Windows 7 Scenic platform (and have brought it to Windows Vista as well) which makes our new user interface possible.