On my home machine I easily have 20,000 pictures and the previous version has been great at managing it.  Though after upgrading, the beta of Live Photo Gallery started to freak out on me and kept shutting down on Vista.  When I tried to remove the Gallery beta the installer kept failing, and I was forced to uninstall the entire suite.  I figured that Photo Gallery may not be ready for large photo collections and I can simply install the previous version and still use the betas of Live Writer and MovieMaker.  Unfortunately I’ve come to find out that you can’t upgrade or downgrade individual applications – it’s all or nothing. Furthermore, you can’t run both the previous and beta versions at the same time.  This has prevented in me using the Live Writer beta (which as been fantastic) on my home computer.

I realize this is a personal gripe, and of course this is part of using beta software and sure enough will be fixed soon.  I just wanted to throw my issue out there to see if anyone else trying out Live Wave was experiencing this issue?  Has anyone else had trouble with Live Photo Gallery, especially if you have a large photo collection?

Today big news came from Microsoft that they released their “Live” services out of beta, releasing some great new tools, including the ability to get a @live.com email address.  There’s nothing like the opportunity to jump on board a new major email bandwagon, and have the ability to have your name – without any numbers of weird spellings – as your email address.

I grabbed the address I wanted and logged into the new Hotmail.  The interface is clean, definitely a step above Gmail and arguably within reach of the new Y! Mail interface.  I goof around a little bit, import my contact list with no problem and send myself the inaugural test message to myself.  Much to my dismay, I receive the following:

You’re kidding me.  An ad at the bottom of my messages?

I realize that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, but when you see the exciting things Gmail is doing with free IMAP access, not to mention that they’ve never had tagline ads at the bottom of their messages – there’s really no compelling reason to use Live mail in a serious capacity.  Granted, Yahoo does still use tagline ads in their messages as well – and it should be known that I pay the $20 per year for the Yahoo Mail plus which removes the tags (and offers other features).  However I’ve personally locked into using my Yahoo mail account through years of usage.  There’s no way I would start using a Live.com account with these annoying taglines here in 2007.  Even if I wanted to upgrade my Live account, there’s no indication on Hotmail that it’s even an option.  I looked all over the “settings” area and couldn’t find anything that referenced upgrading your account. In Yahoo Mail it’s right there in the “Options” tab.

I can appreciate that Microsoft wants to remove some of the perceived stigma that has been historically attached to the “Hotmail” branding, but if you’re going to put a new face/branding on a limited product, you’re still going to have to live with the limitations.  I don’t know how they can expect people to live with “Live” with crap like this going on.