Windows Live Chronicles

Microsoft released today its new Antivirus program. It is free, lightweight and powerful.

You can get it here.

I really think it is a great product from Microsoft. It gives PC users the choice on how to secure their PCs without compromise on the quality and price. There are many great subscription offerings in the market, with more maintenance and backup features. I personally like the new Windows 7 maintenance and backup features so I don’t feel the need to pay for those.

Remember, like any other Antivirus, you need to uninstall the one installed on your computer before installing a new one (Control Panel, Uninstall a program).

Enjoy!

AG

Let’s say you are going to a concert, a party or any event that you feel like sharing almost in real time. Or like me, you have a young baby at home and you want to share pictures with your loved ones. Most of my family lives abroad and my parents complain about not receiving enough pictures of their Canadian grand-child. I use Windows Live Photos on a regular basis and that works very well for us. Sometimes I find it super convenient to publish pictures directly from my smartphone, no need to get the memory card out or plug any cable. There is a great feature in Windows Live photos that allows you to publish photos by sending an email with the photo(s) as an attachment.

Here is how to do it in just a few very simples steps, and you only have to set it up once:

Step 1:

Sign-in on your Windows Live Photos account (http://photos.live.com).

Step 2:

Create an album by clicking on “create album”, and choose who you want to share it with. For example, I created an album called “Live Pictures”:

Step 3:

No need to add any picture at this point, so let’s just cancel:

Step 4:

Go in Options, and select E-mail publishing

 Step 5:

Turn on e-mail publishing by checking the box.

Then type the email address(es) that you are going to send the picture from. For example, any email address that you had set up on your smartphone, like Hotmail or your work email.

Lastly, type a secret word for security purposes. So no one else but you can publish a picture in your album.

Step 6:

In this section, you can associate a keyword with a specific album. For example, I am going to associate the word “live” to the album I just created called “Live Pictures”. This allows you to publish photos in different albums. As you can see below, I created earlier an album called “Party”, the keyword “party” will allow me to publish pictures to this album.

Step 7:

Now all I have to do now is email the picture as a attachment to the email address cid-eadf6256f4efe35f.live.secretword@spaces.live.com to publish photos in the album “Live pictures”.

The email address is composed like this: your_id#.album_keyword.secretword@spaces.live.com

Because the ID# is quite long, I strongly suggest that you copy and paste this email address in your contact list. Then, from your smartphone, you just email the picture to that contact. There is a way to have a friendlier ID# thanks to Windows Live Spaces, send me an email if you are interested.

Depending on your Smartphone, there are different ways to email this picture as an attachment. You will be able to do that from your Windows Mobile phone, your iPhone or your Blackberry.

If you have any question about this tutorial, or if you would like to see other tutorials, send me an email crazybob@live.ca

AG

Over the last few months we have rolled-out many new features and improvements to your Hotmail account (and we will continue to do so). It is now faster, with better Spam and Virus protection and ever-growing storage. You also have access to Windows Live Messenger directly from your Hotmail page and can access it from any computer connected to the Internet. In the next few days you will now have the ability to send and receive your messages from other email accounts in one place. Hotmail gives you one place to login and check ALL your messages.

You can learn more about these new features from Julie and Hal:

We are working hard to keep our users satisfied, and with close to 19 million users* we are the proud leader of Webmail services in Canada.

Your Canadian Windows Live team

* Source ComScore Canada – May 2009

Free your photos from their prisons! Stop the senseless deletions! Only you can help us:

http://www.freeyourphotos.ca/

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On behalf of the Windows Live team, I want to introduce you to the latest update in the Windows Live social networking portfolio – starting today, you can keep your friends up to date in Windows Live from Facebook!  Now if you upload new pictures to facebook, share news, videos, status updates, … all of these will show up in your what’s new feed in Messenger, Hotmail, and your Windows Live Homepage!

All you need to do is to click on the following link then follow 3 easy steps: add, authenticate, allow, and you are set! 

Not a facebooker?  With this release we also launched many other partner integrations as well, such as  Digg, Last.fm, Photobucket, and more.  Click here to look at all the latest partners we have available!

Old news to many, hopefully still new to some!

To all you facebookers and messenger lovers, I know you love updating facebook status message all the times and I also you love messenger and you are keeping it on 24x7, now here’s one tip that helps you update your facebook status messenger even more often!!

Now you can update your facebook status via messenger!

Here’s what it will look like

To do it, it’s actually simpler than you think:

1st - add the messenger app to your facebook,  http://apps.facebook.com/windowslivemessenger/.  [P.S. this app is created by Microsoft]

2nd go to the settings page, and check the second box

QED!

And I’d love to end this post with a quote from my friend Dharmesh..

It’s a mistake! Please just ignore it – you won’t have any problem signing into Messenger using your existing Messenger ID.  Our core team has also made a blog post here.  We are really sorry for the confusion that this might have caused, but trust me, I also feel your pain: even though I didn’t see the error myself (was having dinner), I received quite a number of emails asking me about the legitimacy of such error :)

I guess on a brighter note, treat it as a belated April fool’s joke. :)

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With the recent launch of Messenger 2009, I’m sure you guys are burning, burning with feedbacks, suggestions, and any other questions you may have.  I just want to quickly put up a post so you can get all Canadian specific contact information so you can direct any of your concerns / feedbacks to the right channel. 

* A rep would get back to you within a few days.  Please make sure that email doesn’t go into your junk mail folder.  Please don’t put feature suggestion here.  It will go into the wrong pipeline and your feedback may not be passed to the right person.

** Please don’t expect a direct email reply.  For questions about the product please use the technical support channel.  But I can guarantee you we take your feedback very, very seriously. I personally review Canadian specific feedbacks on a monthly basis.  So yes, someone’s reading your feedback :) Your verbatims will help me understand what you like/dislike about messenger so I can submit feature request for the next wave of messenger.

This is hilarios :)  It’s a campaign running in the US, basically it’s a face off between two generations and see how fast they can master a feature in a certain product, worth a watch. 

  VS

8 vs 80: Slide show

9 vs 90: Photo Sharing

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