Download Windows Live Essentials 2011 Beta Refresh

Windows Team Blog has just announced that the new and updated version of Windows Live Essentials 2011 Beta Refresh is now officially released and available for download for free.

The Windows Live Essentials 2011 Beta Refresh brings lots of improvements, enhancements, features, and bug fixes. One of the feature that all the Windows Live Essentials users have been waiting for is the ability to optionally chat with Facebook friends directly from Windows Live Messenger. Read more to find out more about the new features and improvements in this latest beta refresh release.

Improvements in Windows Live Essentials 2011 Beta Refresh

Windows Live Essentials 2011 beta brings various major performance and quality improvements, which includes decreasing the time taken to start each program or render each web page. Some of the major improvements in beta version of Windows Live Essentials 2011 are as follows:

A quicker Messenger
The time it takes to sign in, and to refresh contacts and social feeds, as well as animation speed, are all faster than in previous versions of Messenger.
More efficient video chat
Messenger video chat uses 30% fewer CPU resources by offloading work to the GPU.
Better facial recognition
Photo Gallery facial recognition is improved significantly and works more quickly.
Larger movie uploads
Movie Maker will upload higher resolution movies to SkyDrive (480×640 vs. the previous 320×480).
Higher bit-rate movies
Movie Maker now supports higher quality (bit-rate) content.
Better spell-checking
Writer has significantly improved the quality of its spell-checking.
Better integration with Office
Writer is much better at retaining all formatting when you copy and paste from Word and other Microsoft Office programs.
Better handling of Gmail
Mail now automatically handles Gmail’s spam and trash folders properly.
Faster web filtering
Family Safety web filtering is 35% faster than in the previous version.

New Features in Windows Live Essentials 2011 Beta Refresh

The Windows Live team is adding lots of new features and tools in the Windows Live Essential 2011 Beta in every update. In this update they have added following new features in it:

Integrated Facebook Chat in Messenger
This is the feature that many of you have been asking, now it’s finally here. The new Facebook chat integration in messenger gives you one more place to chat with all your Facebook and Live Messenger friends.
Quick Previews and Improved Tree View in Photo Gallery
One of the benefits of the new ribbon user interface in Windows Live Essentials is the ability it gives you to preview a change before you apply it simply by hovering over the option. Now today, the preview capabilities to the “Find” tab in the ribbon. So before you apply a filter (date, rating, people tags), you can hover over one of those filters and see the results instantly.
Snapshot in Movie Maker
With the new Snapshot feature in Movie Maker, you can select a single frame from a video as it appears in the preview window and add it to your movie. This allows you to quickly grab an image that you want to keep or perhaps use for your movie’s intro or closing.
Flicker Video Publishing
Many of you use Flickr for photo sharing and have enjoyed publishing to Flickr right from Photo Gallery, so in this version there is an extended support to Movie Maker, so that you can now publish videos directly from Movie Maker or Photo Galley to Flickr too.

Download Windows Live Essentials 2011 Beta Refresh

The Windows Live Essentials 2011 Beta Refresh is now available for download for free in eight different languages. The estimated file size is around 150MB (Mega Bytes) having a build number 15.4.3001.0809.

You can download Windows Live Essentials 2011 Beta Refresh from the direct download link given below:

English – Full Offline Installer
French – Full Offline Installer
German - Full Offline Installer
Dutch - Full Offline Installer
Portuguese (Brazilian) - Full Offline Installer
Spanish - Full Offline Installer
Japanese - Full Offline Installer
Chinese (Simplified) - Full Offline Installer

The above links are for offline installer which takes less time for installation and will be helpful if you decided to install it on multiple computers, but if you still want a web/online installer then you can download it from here.