I’m not sure if Microsoft is trying to make the new Facebook ( of course they are), if they’ve gone crazy, or if they just want messenger to be super-bloated. It seriously makes Messenger about 4 times larger than it ever needs to be. The first and possibly biggest mistake they’ve made with the new version is the HUGE social tab. The Live Messenger is more or less what we’ve always seen with MSN Messenger. Below I’ll be briefly showing you each Live Essential application, and you can decide for yourself if you think they are worth it for YOU to install. Personally, I won’t be using all of these applications, but I’ve gone ahead and installed them all just to write this article. All the Apps are listed with a checkbox, so you can pick and choose exactly what you want. Depending on what you already have installed, some of the Suite installs as new or updated. The installer will open up the menu shown in the screenshot below, and you’ll then be able to pick and choose which programs you want to download and install. You can pick up a copy for yourself at ( at the time of this writing.) The site will have you download a 1.2 MB file called wlsetup-webc.exe, which is the installer. The Live Essentials Beta package is available to everyone for download.

As always, the entire suite of software is 100% free.

Windows live essentials 2011