Today I received an email from Microsoft that Microsoft Live Mesh beta will be discontinued, and that I will need to install the new Live Mesh.

To deliver a better product for all our customers, we combined several services into a new product called Windows Live Mesh. Windows Live Mesh has several performance and reliability improvements compared to the Live Mesh beta, and with Windows Live Mesh, you can also sync your program settings for Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office.

"The King is dead, long live the new King"?

Couldn't they just announce that the beta stage has ended and you need to update the Live Mesh software to continue using it? So I followed the link to the website, where I am greeted with the dialog that the new Live Mesh will only work on Windows Vista or Windows 7, but not Windows XP. I'm still using Windows XP, so pretty soon Live Mesh will become unusable for me. *sigh*

Note: Windows Live Mesh is available only for Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, and Mac OS X version 10.5 or later.

Lucky enough they refer in the mail to another service Microsoft offers, called SkyDrive, so I went to look there. I have 5gb free space of the 5gb total that Skydrive.

Here's another page viewing my Skydrive properties. Now I suddenly have 25gb available for storage, of which I've used approximately 5gb!

What's not mentioned in the email I've received is that there is a web interface to Windows Live Mesh as well that I could use to download the files instead of having to resort to using a Windows Vista or 7 machine with Live Essentials (which are not so essential for me).

Things were so much easier when Foldershare was still a separate entity and not part of the Microsoft mammoth... *sigh*