Today was the release of the much anticipated Windows Live Essentials Beta. As usual i rushed and downloaded it. It look as good as the blogposts everywhere said it would be. However it didn’t work that way. Unlike the previous Essentials Installer it didn’t ask me what Applications I wanted to download, it just installed everything: I was only interested in installing the new messenger.

Anyways, after waiting for around half an hour the download completed and I sat down to check it out. I added my WLM account and then my Facebook account. Once I fired up messenger, I was taken aghast! It was brilliant! It was like reading a social newspaper, the large graphics and columns of status updates reminded me of carefully crafted newspaper articles. If the social page is too constricted it is possible to switch to MSN and view the ‘global newspaper’ of sorts. Sports, Local, News etc all right there in your Messenger Windows. On the right were my online friends, they included my facebook friends as well. However whenever i double clicked to open up a conversation with them nothing happened. It just redirected me to the Facebook Website to send them a Inbox. So much for Facebook Chatting in Messenger. Moving on, I switched to the compact view, which listed all my friends like the regular messenger. Something that annoyed me was that I couldn’t change my display name to whatever I wanted. I’m not the guy to keep a name like (M)(6)(z)Zaf(M)(6)(z) but I definitely prefer placing a nickname like Zaf, instead of my complete name. It made it look very formal. A few hours later something bothered me. No one was chatting with me. Even conversations I opened up didn’t work. Due to this I couldn’t actually experience the Tabbed Chats that I anticipated dearly. Something was very wrong. I whipped up a chat with my sister and then asked her if she was receiving them. Yes she was and she was even replying. Then why couldn’t I see her IMs? She told me I was “offline”(though I was very much online).

Frustrated and annoyed. I just uninstalled the beta. I’m downgrading back to the old messenger.All these features are of no use if its impossible to chat in a client that’s built to chat.

Having problems with the New Messenger? Sound of in the comments!

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