Three Windows Live Services Worth Checking Out
PaulSpoerry | March 4, 2009
It seems Microsoft has been getting a bad rap lately… as if they can’t do anything right. While it’s true that Microsoft has become a software behemot, often moving slower than the competition in many regards there are a couple of software “service” gems that they’ve put out lately that are worth taking a look at.
Microsoft has been rolling out a slew of them, including several that match or beat competing offerings from Google, Yahoo, and any number of startups you’ve never heard of.
Windows Live SkyDrive
Windows Live SkyDrive is a cloud storage service offered by Microsoft. The best part is it’s no strings attached 25GB of online storage… for free. It’s pretty simple and straight forward to use, ust create folders on the site and upload files to it. You can share any of your folders with friends, family members, etc.
SkyDrive is NOT flawless. You can’t mount it as a virtual drive on your PC (where it shows up as a new drive letter), this prevents you from saving files directly to it within other programs. Still, you can’t argue with 25GB of free storage, especially considering that neither Google nor Yahoo currently has this kind of service. Google is rumored to be working on a similar service called GDrive (but it hasn’t surfaced yet). Yahoo’s Briefcase provides only 25MB of space, and is getting the axe at the end of March anyway.
Windows Live Sync
If you have multiple PC’s and you want to keep files and folders on them synchronized then this service might be for you. After you download and run a small piece of software on each PC, head to the Windows Live Sync site and tell it which folders on which PCs should stay in sync.
Live Sync allows you to synchronize your personal folders as well as your shared ones. Whenever a PC with Live Sync is online the folders you’ve specified will automagically sync with one another. The one caveat, and perhaps a plus for some users, is that Live Sync does NOT keep copies of your files in the cloud. It’s a simple PC to PC sync tool; but since it doesn’t sync to the cloud you can keep any volume of data you wanr in sync.
Live Mesh
Live Mesh is more powerful than Windows Live Sync and probably the direction the company is heading as a whole.
Instead of just a PC to PC sync you create folders in Live Mesh and then have all of your PCs synchronize with those folders. In other words, your data is sync’d to the cloud and then to any PC configured with Live Mesh. With this setupi you can access the files and folders from any computer (provided you’re online). You can choose to synchronize only the files modified in the last 30 days, or those under 500MB, etc. Live Mesh supports remote control of any PC in your mesh, as well. So far,Microsoft has announced no plans to charge for storage–or to limit the amount of data you can store. My personal experience with Live Mesh was that it worked great for small files. However, it constantly sync’s… so if you have a large file it can blast your CPU while it’s attempting to keep the file in sync (I was trying it with a 1GB file). One of the more interesting parts of Live Mesh is that it will also allow for Mobile Device sync (provided you use a Windows Mobile device).
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