Windows Live Essentials 2011 Released

OMG, its full of bloat!!!!!!!!

Stars Dave, it's full of stars!

How so? You only install what you need and use. I use Windows Mail and Photo Gallery. Hardly bloatware.

Just more of what you already got. Thanks but I'll pass.

This release offers such extreme amounts of bloat, but one thing ticked me off.

The nickname function has been REMOVED in the name of connecting will all sorts of social network sites, so you can no longer have say < 3, ; D or ^.^ in your display name, but instead you must use a given name and a surname that only allows letters.

I personally uninstalled this garbage straight away and reinstalled the previous version.

Take a look at WLM........ Its almost the entire screen now instead of just your contact list. The news screen and it are one now. You use to be able to turn it off and just have a clean contact list. Even how you config everything is screwed up. Not everything is configurable either as it was under the older versions. Big Brother has taken most of that out of our hands since, after all, they know better.

Its ugly.

Wait, people still use WLM/MSN?

http://www.trillian.im/

And gmail as mail client. You can even run your shoddy hotmail or ISP email through gmail.

Thanks for the feedback, Callesen58 and scharchuk. It sounds like I'll be keeping my old version of WLM. "Newer "is not always "better".

Yes, trusted computing is on it again!

I serious hope all these social networks kill themselves with content, like it happened to all the random search engines google killed.

Have no time for MSN, it proves Microsoft is still living in the past.  

There are more superior programs and services to be used are free and less 'chunky'

  ... or Pidgin if you want a no fuss chat client

It stay with you as a member? 

Argh! This is awful! It switched all my contacts (including mine) names to SURNAME + NAME instead of what we use here, in Portugal (NAME + SURNAME).

We never use the surname first. It's so confusing and irritating!

Told you. lol

I was already using this version since its beta, and I got to say, it is great that it is finally out of beta mode, but of all the services above I only messenger and writer only

bloated, resource hog and pointless, especially with trillian out there abl;e to connect to all of them. Never had windows live or MSN on my computer and not about to start now.

I tried Trillian a couple years ago but from what I remember Msn smileys didn't work so I uninstalled it. Have they fixed that?

Sounds like I'll wait a bit.

Trilian doesnt support custom emotes - /FAIL

The new WLM is truly horrible, so are the emotes.

This thing is a nightmare. I installed the Beta. It crashed. It wouldn't uninstall properly so the new one won't install.

I've given up on the programmers at Microsoft, They're not up to the standards of the last bunch of coders.

I now use Zimbra and Picassa and am quite satisfied.

Or voice chat right? I just want a no fuss voice chat that isn't as stripped down as Skype is. Live used to be great but their last version messed up Voice chat on a few netbooks.