Microsoft has released a major update to their Windows Live products suite - Windows Live Essentials Wave 4 is currently in beta and is now available to the public. The WL Essentials suite consists of 9 different software; Windows Live Messenger, Writer, Mail, Sync, Photo Gallery & Movie Maker, Family Safety, Bing Bar and Outlook Connector Pack. All of the above apps have received major upgrades over their older Wave 3 versions. For example, WLM 15 (aka WLM 2011) now features Facebook integration including Facebook chat and other social updates from the service. Although there have been leaked builds available on various 3rd party sites for a while, you can now download the official Wave 4 beta suite directly from Microsoft. And contrary to popular belief, you can select and install only the components you need – installing all 9 apps is not mandatory.
I came across several different popular tech blogs where it was mentioned that you needed to install the entire Windows Live Essentials suite on your computer if you wanted to test out at least one app from the bunch. This is not exactly true – there are two versions of Windows Live Essentials Wave 4 installer. One will start installing the entire suite without any user prompt but the other would give a screen (see image above) where you can select and deselect which components to install. Personally, I only use two software in the Live suite – Writer and Messenger. It would be stupid to install 7 other apps I’d never use and clutter my system just to try these two out.
Download
[Click Here] to download Windows Live Essentials Installer – this installer will give you an options screen where you can deselect applications you don’t want to install
[Click Here] to download Windows Live Essentials Automatic Installer – this will download and install all live apps on your computer without prompt.
