Windows Live Essentials 2011 Update Released

[Jason Dunn]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_live/b/windowslive/archive/2011/07/06/coming-this-week-an-update-to-windows-live-essentials-2011.aspx' target='_blank'>http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_...tials-2011.aspx</a><br /><br /></div><p><em>"This week, we will release an update to Windows Live Essentials 2011. In addition to changes that improve performance and quality of service, the update also includes full support for SSL in Windows Live Mail, and the latest Bing bar. Here are a few of things we think you'll find the most interesting: Mail: We fixed a sorting issue in the Sent items folder and improved the upload reliability and instrumentation in Photo mail. Messenger: We fixed a couple of stability issues and made various changes for improved voice and video quality. We fixed an issue that was causing sound to be lost after upgrading, and we improved performance when displaying the MSN Today page in the main window."</em></p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1310090636.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></p><p>The download is available now, <a href="http://explore.live.com/windows-live-essentials?os=other" target="_blank">so go get it</a>! I don't see Live Mesh listed, but I'm dearly hoping they improved the performance and made it less hard-drive-hammery (it kills performance forever after a reboot).</p>

[ptyork]

Nope, no love for Mesh. At least no performance improvements that I can detect.

I truly don't get it. It spends 15+ minutes on boot "scanning files" and consuming up to 50% of my CPU. It really is like the developers are lacking any target performance figures. I recently changed logins on my work PC (came out from my rogue, non-domain existence). Same PC. Same files. Took 2 days for it to become "up to date." Now admittedly I have tens of thousands of files in total (probably totalling 200GB since it's mostly JPEG and RAW photos), but this is pathetic. There truly must be no performance target for that team. Or perhaps one that is set far to "realistically." Uugh I miss FolderShare. But I'm stuck since there's no viable alternative for how I use the service.

You really have to wonder whether they're going to continue to put any effort into it now that Ray Ozzie is gone. Good old Ray. Bringer of such dog-like products as Lotus Notes, Groove, and finally Mesh. It really is as though he had one notion of how things should work (exceedingly slow database synchronization) and couldn't get past it. Like the Wizard of Oz, his products had lots of bling and "potential," but behind that curtain, still the same old dog.

[Jason Dunn]

I truly don't get it. It spends 15+ minutes on boot "scanning files" and consuming up to 50% of my CPU. It really is like the developers are lacking any target performance figures.

I'm personally astounded that they don't throttle the disk usage somewhat - when it kicks off a sync, I'm seeing north of 50 MB/s disk usage, which practically paralyzes my system...and it's no better on the laptop I had an SSD in, likely because the high CPU usage is killing it. So much potential, but so useless if you have big libraries like we do (I think mine is more like 90 GB though). 200 GB is mildly insane. :D

But I'm stuck since there's no viable alternative for how I use the service.

Some good news on that front: the forerunner for me was always SugarSync, but they didn't do LAN-only sync, insisting on jamming everything up into the cloud whether you wanted it or not (ugg!). But now it seems it's something they're working on:

http://twitter.com/#!/SugarSync/statuses/89079076366725120

So that's good news. :)