Digital Home Thoughts: Windows Live Essentials 2011 Now Released

"We are pleased to announce that Windows Live Essentials 2011 for Windows 7 and Windows Vista is now available for download! (Releasing in 48 languages over the next few hours, so if your language is not yet available, it will be very soon.) Windows Live Essentials 2011 was designed and built to connect your PC to the services you use every day. We're also announcing today that Dell will be the first global PC manufacturer to ship PCs with Windows Live Essentials 2011 and Windows 7 pre-installed, just in time for your holiday purchases. Many other PC manufacturers are also planning to make Windows Live Essentials 2011 available and we'll continue to keep you updated as they start releasing."

I can't find a list of exactly what's new compared to the beta - one presumes it wasn't just bug-fixing - but, regardless, the 2011 suite of Live products is ready for download. It's a bit too early for me to tell if they've fixed some of the really ugly and really frustrating problems with Live Sync Mesh. After installing the new Sync Mesh client on all my computers, I've watched as it tells me it needs to re-sync tens of thousands of files (in my case, well over 40K files) - but in reality, it's simply re-indexing them all across my machines.

Unfortunately, some serious performance hits come with this re-indexing - my machines are noticeably sluggish while this process is under way, and it's a process that can take hours and hours to complete if you have a large library. The performance hits of the beta seem to be a little less painful; while I saw the MOE.exe process use up to 61 MB/s of hard drive throughput at one point, it has settled down to the 3 MB/s to 18 MB/s range and rarely goes above 20% CPU usage. This is better than it was, but it still makes my PCs feel like they're under-clocked to 400 Mhz. Once this ugly re-sync process is completed, I'll get a better feeling for how well the new Sync Mesh client works.

UPDATE: It's been a few hours since I installed the software, and the Live Sync re-indexing is just brutal...I'm actually going to shot a video about it just to demonstrate how ugly the performance hit is. I'm extremely disappointed in the quality of the Live Mesh product and will be looking for an alternative solution. I'll do a different post about that...

UPDATE #2: I've managed to get Live Mesh working properly, but it took a long time and a bit of effort. After installing the final 2011 software, I let my machines sync for over 24 hours...and they still weren't finished! It's like the software was caught in a death spiral because the libraries were so large (about 40,000 files in total). I disabled all of the libraries except for one, and once I did that, it started to respond normally. Once that library was finished, I enabled the next one, waited for it to update, then went on to the next library. While this was happening, my systems were practically useless due to the system load that Live Mesh places upon it. Now when Live Mesh is running a sync, I can definitely see my system slowing down, but unless I'm synching a huge number of files, the process is finished fairly quickly. I'll be sticking with Live Mesh for now, but I'll be keeping my eyes open for alternatives because Live Mesh leaves much to be desired...