Download Windows Live Essentials to restore common Windows apps

If you’re a Windows XP user who has just migrated to Windows 7, you’re likely to notice a few old friends missing: notably, a mail client (Outlook Express) and Windows Movie Maker. And if you’re using Vista, the Windows Mail, Movie Maker, and Photo Gallery apps might be conspicuous by their absence in 7.

In Windows 7, Microsoft has moved these programs off-OS and made them part of a downloadable package of apps called “Windows Live Essentials.” (Why, if they’re “Essentials,” they’re not included as part of the OS is another story, though.) This is the Live Essentials page; the download link is below (click the page image to go there now, if you like):

You’ll need to sign up for a free Windows Live account to download the lot. (You may well already have one.) You may or may not need Live Essentials, depending on the e-mail client you tend to use and whether you already own some favorite photo- and video-editing software, but we think the download is worth the trouble, regardless. For one thing, the Windows Photo Gallery app has been bulked up a bit from Vista’s; it now has more editing functions, so it can be a time saver versus launching a full-featured photo editor. And Windows Movie Maker, as in Vista, incorporates the ability to burn a DVD Video direct from the app, so no need to fire up Nero, Roxio, or another big burning app for straightforward jobs. Check out the Live Essentials pack at http://download.live.com.

Fix the Column views in Windows Live Mail

Here at ComputerShopper.com, some of the editors migrated their home PCs from Windows XP or Vista to Windows 7, and we encountered a little glitch with Windows Live Mail that drove us bananas for the better part of an afternoon. We’d like to save you the same grief.

Our e-mails imported fine from XP’s Outlook Express, but we found that in the “Sent items” view in Live Mail, it was impossible to tell at a glance to whom we sent our mails. That’s because the columns in the default view didn’t include the one for the “To:” field. (Your mileage may vary. The missing “To:” field didn’t happen in another install we performed, but the next step—the grey-out issue—did.)

Simple enough, we thought—it’s easy to customize the view to show the “To:” field. You’d just hit Alt, go the View menu, choose the Columns item, and…hey wait a minute, the Columns menu option is greyed out! Hmmm. All we wanted was to restore this little column:

An afternoon of tweaking and searching later, we discovered that, strangely enough, repositioning the preview pane (the region of the screen that shows you a preview portion of a selected e-mail) was the only thing that would “un-grey” the Columns item on the View menu. This is likely a bug, and we’d expect it to be fixed before long. But how to work around it, for now?

In your Sent Mail view in Live Mail, hit Alt to bring up the menu bar, click View > Layout, and in the Layout dialog box, change the Reading pane (Mail) entry to At the bottom of the message list. (You can also uncheck the Show the reading pane box if you’d like to get rid of the pane altogether.) Hit OK, and you should be able to access the Columns entry in the View menu to tweak the columns that are displayed.

Pin frequently used files or folders to taskbar program icons (Jump Lists)

Windows 7’s taskbar rethink means that a large number of the tips and tweaks here involve this thin bit of real estate, but here’s another taskbar-related tidbit that’s nonetheless invaluable. It’s been possible to set up shortcuts to frequently used files or folders on the Windows Desktop for ages, of course, but accessing them requires minimizing or otherwise moving around windows to uncover them. Windows 7, however, allows you to “pin” files or folders you use often onto relevant program icons in the taskbar for easy access, always keeping them above the desktop-window fray.

For example, say you often work with a spreadsheet file called “TAXES.XLS” in Excel. Launch Excel, then find the file “TAXES.XLS.” Left-click or right-click on the file itself, then drag it onto the Excel taskbar program icon. You should see a message to “Pin to Microsoft Excel”; when you do, release the mouse button.

The file will be added to what Windows 7 calls a Jump List, a list of frequently accessed files, folders, and actions that you can get to right from the taskbar via the program’s icon. Here's a sample Jump List for Microsoft Word:

For a Jump List to be at hand, the program needs to have been launched, however—or its icon permanently pinned to the taskbar.