Beyond that, it could provide an important syncing foundation for many other Microsoft products in the future, including the Web version of Office. That's a shame, because for people with multiple PCs, this little app may be the best of the bunch. The sleeper of the group that has gotten very little notice is Windows Live Sync. In this review, I'll look at the changes in this beta version of Windows Live Essentials compared to Wave 3. Other applications, such as Windows Live Sync and Windows Live Writer, are unique to Live Essentials. Some of the offerings in Windows Live Essentials are applications that originally shipped with Windows but were stripped out in Windows 7, such as Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Photo Gallery and Windows Live Movie Maker. Some features have been optimized for Windows 7 - for example, Windows Movie Maker can make use of codecs built into Windows 7. Windows Live Essentials works only with Windows Vista and Windows 7, so Windows XP users are out of luck.
The new release has a lineup of applications that is almost identical to that of its predecessor: Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Photo Gallery, Windows Live Movie Maker, Windows Live Sync, Windows Live Writer, Windows Live Family Safety and the Bing Bar (which replaces the previous Windows Live Toolbar). The Wave 4 release of Windows Live Essentials comes about a year and a half after the Wave 3 release. In fact, they're some of the best free applications you'll find anywhere and are well worth the download.
But the individual products are useful, solid pieces of work and often quite powerful, given that they're free. As a coherent product line, there's no clear theme tying everything together. Whether you'll be impressed with this newest version will depend on whether you view it as a single, coherent product line or as a group of disparate applications. It's a grab-bag of useful, if often unrelated, applications that offer a variety of services for doing things such as managing photos, creating videos, checking e-mail, doing instant messaging, writing blog posts and synchronizing data among PCs. The beta of Microsoft's latest update of its free Windows Live Essentials line of online applications - which Microsoft calls Wave 4 - was recently released to reviewers and beta testers the final release is expected sometime this summer.
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