Windows 7: Windows Live Essentials

That coupled with the abandonment of a lot of old, *good* working hardware by Manufacturers as they moved to making new products that supported Vista....



More than anything, that hurt the most.

Yes, but if this beta tells you anything there wont be much of that going on this time around. LOL which is appealing when you live in these times.

If you are unhappy with Windows Live Essentials 2011 you can revert back to
Windows Live Essentials 2009. Here is the page at eggheadcafe.com with the process.

We have installed Windows Live Essentials, but cannot find the programs either in the taskbar or the list in programs files and when looking at the control panel listing of programs it is not there either. Everything seems to indicate that Essentials has installed. We ran the installation as administrator, and still no luck. Any suggestions?

Did you by any chance perform a custom installation and turn off the option to create shortcuts?

The only choice we had was to pick the programs we wanted to install. We did "all" and Photo only. Did not have the option to turn off Shortcuts. Nothing seem to make a difference.

Tried to use an older version but we were stopped by a message that we had a more current version on the computer. Cannot find the current version.

You need to download the entire new version of Windows Live Essentials and put a check mark next to every feature. After it completes the installation, go into Program and Features and uninstall the entire suite "Windows Live Essentials 2011". You could also download the free version of Revo Uninstaller and use it. BUT, when you first choose WLE 2011, allow Windows Uninstaller to remove everything first. When asked to restart your computer, choose NO. Allow Revo to do an advanced scan so you can delete all the left over files and folders that would effect the older version installation. I will assume that the above went well...

There is a url you will need at eggheadcafe.com to download the older suite. It's in this thread I posted a couple months ago.
Revert to Windows Live Essentials 2009!

Download the entire MSE 2009 application. Save it to your hard drive then begin the installation. After it finishes installing everything, go back to Program and Features and remove whatever feature you do not want. Very important: Go to Windows Updates manually and check for new downloads. You will see Windows Live Essentials 2011. Right click on that download and choose hide. You do not want that to download or you're right back to where you started.

It's a lot of work if you're new to this sort of thing but it's also a good learning curve.

Keep us posted.