Unbeknown to me, Microsoft already offers a service called Live Sync. Consequently, several of you rushed off to sign up for the existing Live Sync, only to be disappointed when it didn’t contain the features we said it did. The old Live Sync (also known as Folder Share) only synchronises files between two PCs that are powered on, while the Live Sync we wrote about promised such goodies as cloud synchronisation, online storage and the ability to share bookmarks and Office settings between different PCs.

So in an attempt to clear up the confusion, we contacted Microsoft to find out exactly what’s happening with the new and old Live Sync. Ready? Here goes:

• The features of Live Mesh and the old Live Sync (called Wave 3 internally at Microsoft) are being combined into a new product called Live Sync (called Wave 4 internally).
• The new Live Sync (W4) will only work on Vista SP2 and Windows 7 machines.
• Windows XP users can still continue to use the old Live Sync (W3), but they won’t be able to synchronise folders with PCs running the new version (W4) on Vista and Windows 7 machines.
• The Live Mesh beta will be closed later this year, and users will be encouraged to migrate to the new version of Live Sync.
• Live Sync (W4) will be launched in beta form later this summer, although Microsoft can’t tell us when.

It’s not like Microsoft to over-complicate matters, is it?

About a year ago I wrote a piece about my initial experiences and first impressions of Microsoft Live Mesh. Essentially I was a huge fan and remain so. In fact I’m now even more excited about the technology and can see it playing a crucial role in the advent of, and successful transition to, cloud-based computing.

This might seem surprising. After all, the way I saw the Live Mesh beta back then, and use it today, is as a glorified data synchronization service. Set up your mesh across multiple systems and you can essentially forget about it: Live Mesh gets to work behind-the-scenes, automatically ensuring that the most recent versions of all your important files are there ready-to-go on whichever of your desktop or notebook systems you happen to be using.

In fact it looks like Live Mesh is a great example of why we don’t need the cloud.  After all, the great advantage of the cloud is that it provides universal access to your current files, but its big disadvantages are that this is only true if you have internet access and that, when you do, you are limited to using lightweight Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). With Live Mesh you get the great benefit of cloud computing but in the online/offline context of local computing and with the major pluses that your precious files remain actual rather than virtual and that you can always use your full-blown desktop applications to edit them.

This is right, but it’s missing out an important element: the Live Desktop. In daily use this is easy to overlook, but it’s important to realise that the way that Live Mesh works its magic is by automatically copying all of your updated files to and from central server-based storage whenever your local systems are connected to the internet.

This Live Desktop doesn’t just act as your central data clearing-house. While you can generally ignore it in current daily use, the fact that your files are stored online and kept live (rather than in some inaccessible backup format) means that in an emergency you can easily get at them, say from an internet cafe or if your office gets flooded.

In other words, via the Live Desktop, Live Mesh adds two other major cloud-based benefits: simple online backup and truly universal access (hopefully with built-in versioning to come). Again though it does so in the context of local computing. So where does the cloud come in?

The point is that as soon as you sign up to Live Mesh, and almost without realising it, you’re automatically storing all of your data online in the cloud. This isn’t just useful for synchronisation and backup – it’s also potentially very useful for work. In particular, with the coming generation of Office-lite RIAs your Live Desktop should be able to become just that – a live, cloud-based alternative platform to your local desktop.

I wrote “alternative platform” and in the longer term that may prove to be the case. However, I think that the real significance of the Live Desktop is as an extension of your local desktop rather than as its replacement.

And the real beauty of Live Mesh is that it should make your Live Desktop a seamless and painless extension. In particular, just as it does today in a local context, Live Mesh could automatically remove the hassle of manually synchronising data to and from the cloud. Work on the most recent version of a file on your Live Desktop with a lightweight, cloud-based device using a lightweight RIA and, when you next open your full-blown desktop or notebook, it’s this new edited version that will automatically open into your full-blown desktop app.

Currently much of the resistance to the idea of cloud computing comes from the assumption that such a fundamental paradigm shift in working practice must inherently involve ditching current desktop-based local computing and that we’d therefore end up losing far more than we’d gain. If the initial premise were true, I’d agree wholeheartedly. However I don’t think that this is an either/or argument.

Thanks to Live Mesh, or some similar technology from other interested parties such as Google, cloud computing can automatically become a seamless extension of local computing and vice versa. With “here, there, anywhere” data handling, we shouldn’t have to choose one over the other, but can instead enjoy the benefits of both.

1. Paint.NET

Windows 7 may now include a version of Paint complete with a fancy Ribbon interface, but it still doesn’t offer the features I need to quickly enhance photos and mould screenshots to my whims. Paint.NET does, and it also supports plug-ins for RAW files (and more), making it my top photo-editing choice.

2. Mozilla Firefox

Sorry Internet Explorer 8, but you’re too slow (as Microsoft’s own engineers accidentally admitted by saying they’d focus on performance with Internet Explorer 9). And frankly, I don’t use all those fancy right-click shortcuts that Microsoft has built in. I far prefer the faster Firefox, complete with all the Extensions such as Echofon for Twitter.

3. Windows Live Writer

I know it’s basic compared to some blogging tools out there, but Windows Live Writer is the perfect partner to our WordPress-powered blog. It’s easy to use while still offering all the power and features I need, such as retaining my favoured settings for photo formatting and links. To download it, type “live essentials” into the Windows 7 or Vista search box.

4. Adobe Reader

I’ve tried to like alternatives to Adobe Reader, such as FoxIt Reader, but against all my best instincts I keep on coming back to the bloated and comparatively slow Adobe offering. And that’s despite the fact I hate the way its install routine tries to sneak in a Yahoo toolbar and those annoying updates. The best thing that can be said about this program is that it works.

5. FileZilla

There may well be better FTP utilities than FileZilla, but as far as I’m concerned everyone can halt development right now: FileZilla is free, it works, and the interface – while doing for good looks what Bob Hoskins does for swimsuit modelling – is plain and functional. As far as I’m concerned, this is the poster child for open-source software.

6. VLC media player

I haven’t actually needed to use this tiny application since rebuilding my PC, but it won’t be long before a media file comes along in a form that Windows Media Player can’t recognise (one obvious example being FLV files). VLC media player, on the other hand, is fantastic at handling pretty much anything that’s thrown at it.

7. Spotify

While I still can’t bring myself to pay £10 per month for music I can’t keep, Spotify is my first port of call when it comes to distraction in the office. After all, a man needs to listen to something to drown out Stuart Turton’s whines about Liverpool’s latest failure (this weekend excepted), Jon Bray muttering to himself as he tests mobile phones, and Barry Collins ranting about various watchdog authorities.

8. BBC iPlayer

Travelling home by a train, sometimes I can’t quite force myself to do anything useful. Luckily those kind people at the BBC have built the iPlayer. With HD shows available for download as well, I’m in the odd situation where TV is better while travelling than at home. Note: this service is only available in the UK. If it’s any consolation, our weather’s awful.

9. Skype

I’ve moaned about Skype’s habit of grabbing my credit unless I use its pay-as-you-go service every six months, but this remains an essential tool in my foreign-trip armoury: much as I love my children, I’m not making 30-minute calls home on mobile roaming rates! With Skype, it’s free to call other Skype users and just 1.7 Euro cents to UK numbers.

10. Windows Live Mesh

I approach Live Mesh with a certain amount of trepidation: press Delete at the wrong time and it has the capability to permanently lose files with almost as much as speed as it allows you to share them. But if you, like me, flitter between different machines at a whim, then having one always-accessible copy of vital files can’t be underestimated.

What you do is, you visit the Live Mesh website, sign in with your Windows Live ID (annoying but important), and then click on Add Device in the resulting page:

This lets you download a little installer – it really is quite small at 1.6MB. Double-click it when it’s downloaded and the Live Mesh client installs itself without fuss (although your desktop might flash once or twice as it installs itself into the Windows shell).

Now, you can right-click on any folder on your system and select ‘Add folder to Live Mesh’.

The folder will then go blue. The contents of the folder have been whisked into the much ballyhooed internet cloud, to be stored on Microsoft’s servers somewhere. The folder contents aren’t moved – only copied – but changes, additions and deletions from the local folder are reflected in the version living in the cloud, more or less immediately.

Now pop to a different PC and go through the same two-minute install process. Click the little Live Mesh icon in the tray and hit the Folders icon. You’ll get a list of every folder that you’ve added to your mesh.

This is the good part: click on a folder, hit Okay in the dialog that pops up and that folder gets pulled down from the cloud and replicated on the desktop (or elsewhere if you prefer) on the local machine. And just like on the originating machine, changes, additions and deletions on the files in that folder are reflected in the cloud-bound version, and pushed back down to any other PCs that have that folder added to their mesh.

That means Live Mesh is not a backup tool – it won’t save you from a virus deleting files, or your own clumsiness if you overwrite a vital file with an empty one. What it does mean is that your data is freed from the shackles of a particular PC and becomes available anywhere, on any PC with an internet connection. Live Mesh is essentially a portal onto your important folders, letting you open them, edit the contents and get to them anywhere you like without restriction. If you don’t have installation rights on the computer you’re using, you can get to the files via the ‘mesh desktop’ view in a browser.

This has changed the working life not only of me but several other members of the PC Pro team. We no longer have to remember to take files home on a flash drive, or email them to ourselves. And no longer is there any problem with synchronisation, since in effect you’re not working on copies of your files remotely, you’re working on the actual file itself (with a delay of a few seconds while changes get uploaded to the servers and then replicated out).

As long as you haven’t left a document open, you can go home, open that document, work on it, save it and close it as usual. When you get to your office machine in the morning, the file is there just where it was before. No explicit synching, no fuss and no thought required. It’s flippin’ marvellous.

Your folders follow you everywhere – it’s the data that matters, and that’s the way it should be.

If none of this sounds terribly compelling, you’ve hit the problem with Live Mesh: it’s hard to convey its fabness – you need to try it. If you have more than one PC and you ever need to get access to the same file on them, you need Live Mesh. Fact.

The thing is, you need to look out for the pattern of a real review as opposed to the one someone’s churned out for the sake of a few pence (or cents, in Belkin’s case) or – in the case of book reviews on Amazon – where the author, publisher or friend of either has posted the review themselves.

Anyway, to fight back against the inevitable backlash I thought I’d quickly write about ten brilliant things the internet has done.

10. Giving the public a voice

The internet has been the ultimate democratiser (a new word I’ll be sending to the Oxford dictionary folks soon), with the public being given a voice via everything from user reviews on Amazon (despite the shambles mentioned above) to blog sites that have the power to affect decisions. Remember what life was like back in 1994?

9. Spread BBC radio across the globe

I was listening to Radio 6 Music this morning, and was once again struck by how absolutely fantastic it is. Quite aside from the quality of the music and the eclectic guests (this morning, a master cooper from Wadsworth Brewery was explaining why he was looking for an apprentice), the DJs are actually there to talk about music rather than just inflate their own egos. And now everyone can listen to Radio 6 Music – not to mention Radio 4 – wherever they are in the world, so long as they have an internet connection.

8. Facebook

I’m currently in my loving Facebook phase, having passed through the Barrier Of Irritation  - thanks in part to sage advice from Lise (thanks Lise) about fiddling around with the settings to get rid of the biggest reminder/post spam irritants. And now it’s become a source of entertainment, whether via ridiculous comments by friends and colleagues or my own not-so-secret addiction to Facebook Scrabble, and very occasionally information too.

7. Built communities

Whatever your interest, be it building bicycle wheels or following Stargate Atlantis, there will be a community you can join to share stories, successes and tips. Compare that to the pre-internet world, where if there weren’t already a number of like-minded souls in your town – and one of them had the gumption to set up a  club – then you were alone.

6. Email

Something so ubiquitous it’s now simply annoying. But who’d go back to paper mail?

5. Created online gaming

As it happens I’m no great fan of online gaming – unless you count the Scrabble I mentioned earlier – but even I can see the mass appeal of playing against a worldful of opponents rather than just a couple of friends or (more likely) yourself.

4. Ended pub arguments

Although ending pub arguments in itself is arguably not a great thing, thanks to Wikipedia (keep that salt handy) and just the whole resource that is the web, you can now get hold of information in a trice. In the olden days, we needed to buy the Encylopedia Britannica.

3. You can’t lose your documents

Thanks to excellent online backup services such as Carbonite and Mozy you now have to try very hard to actually lose documents, while the likes of Dropbox and Live Mesh have solved the tiresome problem of sharing documents between computers that aren’t on a network. No more burning to CD, no more searching through piles of miscellaneous media to find vital files. Hurrah!

2. Made software free

Despite the best efforts of Adobe, Microsoft and Symantec, there’s absolutely no need to pay for software any more. The internet has made it easier than ever to co-develop open-source software, and we’ve also seen the advent of free software as a marketing tool – so get anti-virus cover for free, but expect nag screens for the full internet security suite. And to top all that, the lovely people at Google have made brilliant software such as SketchUp free as well.

1. Means I never need go shopping again

But my all-time favourite thing about the internet is that it means I never need go shopping again. For example, I bought two pairs of shoes online last night. And there really isn’t anything you can’t buy: contact lenses, books, holidays, organic vegetable boxes, music… it’s little wonder that Woolworths, Zavvi and numerous other high-street names are finding life tough.

Firstly, don’t be shy of removing all that crapware. Much as we all love to have our sparkly new laptops pre-filled with junk, it is worth going over the list of installed programs with a fine toothcomb to weed out the useless from the useful. Do you really need that Microsoft Office 60-day trial, or that 30-day demo of Norton AntiVirus? No, you don’t. And don’t forget to look through each icon in the system tray and ask yourself whether it’s ever going to come in useful. Trim the pointless items from your startup folder, or better still uninstall them completely, and your laptop will start faster than ever.

Now you’ve rid your laptop of all that awful rubbish, it’s time to put something far more useful on there instead. You don’t need to go splashing your cash about though, as there’s plenty of free software that does a sterling job.  

1.       Google Chrome – It’s not such a big issue with powerful laptops, but if you’re working with the more modest processing power of a netbook or ultraportable, we’d highly recommend installing Google Chrome. Whether it’s being run on a hulking desktop replacement or a lowly netbook, Google’s browser springs to life faster than any of its competitors. And, what’s more, its clutter-free display makes the absolute most of a netbook’s limited screen resolution.

2.       OpenOffice.org – Ok, so it’s not a patch on the refined beauty of Office 2007, that’s for sure, but it’s also quite a bit cheaper. With a price tag of exactly zero pence it’s difficult to argue with such a fully-featured, highly usable office suite. Download it now and do some work, you know you want to. 

3.       VLC Media Player  – Ready for the less dull, pedestrian moments in your laptop’s existence, there are few better media players than VLC. It’s the swiss-army-knife of media players, capable of playing pretty much any music or movie file you can feed it. You need never suffer Windows Media Player ever again. Hopefully.

4.       Live Mesh – If you’ve heard the Podcast in recent weeks, then chances are Tim, David or any number of the PC Pro team has wittered on about Microsoft’s latest wunderkind. What is it? Well, it’s online storage, essentially. Save all your documents and files to Live Mesh and then wherever you are, whether it’s at work, home or just at the local internet café, you can have access to the latest versions of your documents then and there via the power of the internet.

5.       Portable Apps – If you’ve got a big old hard disk in your notebook or netbook, then you probably don’t care about a few hundred megabytes here and there. But, if you’re struggling to get by on the handful of gigabytes offered by a tiny SSD then there is hope. Head on over to the Portable Apps website and you can download a range of free software which has been tweaked to run directly from a USB flash drive or memory card. Mozilla FireFox, Pidgin, VLC Media Player, 7-Zip, FileZilla and OpenOffice.org 3.0 are just a few amongst the many free software packages on offer.

6.       Avira AntiVir Personal  – When it comes to Anti-virus software, Avira’s AntiVir Personal is by far the best of the freebies. It does a good job of stopping all kinds of malware in its tracks, and isn’t too far off the protection of commercial products. The only niggle is the software’s insistence on nagging you to upgrade every time you download updated virus definitions – that’s just the price you’ll have to pay for being such a freeloading cheapskate. 

The solution is to have some sort of synchronization system. Most users rely on copying files to physical middlemen such as CD-RWs and USB sticks or to virtual middlemen such as FTP sites or online services such as BT’s Digital Vault or Acrobat.com. However this manual approach is awkward and unreliable. Really the system needs to be automatic. Which is where Microsoft’s Live Mesh comes in.

Sign up to this free service from each of your computers (currently Vista and XP with Mac support set to follow) and then in Windows Explorer right-click on any folder and you can add it to your mesh and set it to automatically synchronize across all of your devices. This means that, within a minute or so of closing any file in one of your local mesh folders, it is automatically copied to your Live Desktop – which then acts as a universally accessible online backup – as well as to all of your internet-connected devices.

What this means in practice is that your most up-to-date files are simply there on your local system ready to go. Once set up, the synchronisation is so transparent that you simply come to expect all of your files to be there waiting whenever you want them, wherever you are and whichever device you are using. It’s a fantastic advance, but the system isn’t actually magic.

In fact, unless you remember how Live Mesh works and act accordingly, it can let you down – badly. To begin with, you need to remember that data outside your designated folders is outside the mesh, and while the 5GB limit is generous for Office-style files it doesn’t begin to cover all of a user’s data.  You also need to realise that open files are also out of the loop. Fail to close a file at work and it won’t be there waiting for you at home. Worse, if you go in the next day and save the open file when you close it, it will overwrite any version that you have worked on in the meantime across all of your systems and online backup too!

These are important issues to bear in mind and I strongly advise that you close files whenever you’ve finished working on them and keep renaming them too to provide basic versioning and backup. Alternatively stick to a manual transfer drop folder rather than automatically synching your work folders.

However files that fall outside the synchronization mesh prove less of a problem than they would have, thanks to Live Mesh’s most extraordinary capability. Log on to your Live Mesh using a browser and, using the Remote Desktop feature, you can take direct control of any connected live system (sorry but you’ll have to switch off hibernation). Load a remote copy of Windows Explorer and you have copy and paste access to all of the data on your hard disk. Even better, you have access to all of your applications – if a file is open remotely you can simply log in to shut it down. Come to that, you can carry on working on it remotely using applications you don’t have locally.

The future implications of Live Mesh’s Remote Desktop are massive – has the promised era of home working and thin computing arrived by the backdoor? However these are questions for the future. For the moment I have a more pressing issue: Live Mesh has lived up to all expectations and far exceeded them in ways I hadn’t imagined, but am I really ready to trust the handling of my most valuable data to beta software from Microsoft? What about you?

Microsoft’s Live Mesh and online start-up Dropbox have come up with similar answers to this problem, offering online services that keep your files in synch across multiple PCs. Both are at the invite-only test phase at present, but we’ve wormed out way into the private betas. Here’s how they compare.

MICROSOFT LIVE MESH

Unlike a number of Microsoft’s other online initiatives, Live Mesh certainly doesn’t suffer from a lack of ambition. It eventually plans to synchronise files across a broad range of devices, ranging from PCs to smartphones to (whisper it) Macs.

For now, however, the service is restricted to XP and Vista PCs. You start by downloading the Live Mesh client software on to your PCs – and immediately recoil in astonishment as the software takes it upon itself to Auto Arrange the carefully placed icons on your Windows desktop. Not a good start.

Live Mesh accounts are linked to your Windows Live account, allowing the service to determine which other devices are connected to your Mesh. You give each new device a name (i.e. ‘work laptop’) to tell them apart in the Live Mesh device manager, and PCs can be added or removed at any time.

Files or folders are added to the Mesh simply by right-clicking on them and selecting Add Folder To Your Live Mesh. The folder instantly turns blue to signify that it’s part of the Mesh, and distinguish itself from ordinary files stored only locally on your PC.

Live Mesh now sets about uploading the contents of the synchronised file/folder to “the cloud”. Simultaneously, it will be creating a copy of that shared folder on to the desktop of every other PC that’s part of your Mesh. The shared folder is stored locally on each machine so that it remains available even when the PC is offline. Files can now be modified, added or removed from that shared folder using any PC in the Mesh, with changes synchronised across all other PCs on the Mesh as quickly as their network connections permit – within a few seconds, in our experience.

A sidebar attached to each Live Mesh folder handily keeps you updated on any activity in the folder, so you know instantly if someone’s edited a photo or removed a file, for example.

Microsoft’s clearly given some thought to potential synchronisation pitfalls. If you add a folder to the Live Mesh with an identical name to a folder on one of your other PCs, a “001” suffix is added to the new folder to prevent potential conflicts. And if you decide to remove a folder from the Mesh (which can only be done using the online interface), a copy of the folder remains on each PC, but it obviously won’t be synchronised from then on in.

Files stored on the Live Mesh aren’t only available on the connected PCs; they’re also available from any web browser, via the “Live Desktop”. Sadly, in typical Microsoft fashion, this has been thoroughly overcomplicated, not least because it uses Microsoft’s own Silverlight technology to create needless smooth-scrolling slideshows of images, for example, instead of simply providing access to your files. You’ll be both shocked and appalled to learn that this works remarkably better in Internet Explorer than it does in Firefox, where we experienced several crashes when trying to do something as simple as view a photo.

Worse still, if you want to share one of your Live Mesh folders with a friend or colleague, they have to use the Silverlight web interface, severely hampering what might otherwise have been a very cool feature indeed.

Nevertheless, Live Mesh remains an impressively powerful and extremely convenient service. Knowing that you can get access to certain folders from any net-connected PC – whether they are on the Mesh or not – provides real peace of mind. And with 5GB of storage to play with, it could even prove to be a decent fallback for backing up critical files.

DROPBOX

Dropbox is an altogether more simple affair. Once installed on your PC, a small box icon appears in your System Tray. Double-clicking on the box opens the Dropbox, where, as the name suggests, you simply drag and drop the files you want to share across your various PCs.

It’s not as convenient as the option to right click on any folder in Live Mesh, but it’s neater, with all your shared documents and folders conveniently stored in one place, rather than potentially strewn across your PC. As with Live Mesh, the files are instantly synchronised across all the PCs on which you’ve installed the Dropbox software.

If you want to share documents with friends or colleagues, they must be deposited in your Dropbox’s public folder. From here you can simply right click on the file and Dropbox automatically creates a public link. Email that link to a friend, and they can view the photo, document or whatever from the Dropbox website. Likewise, you can share entire folders, although this has to be managed through an online wizard.

Dropbox has been set up by a bunch of former MIT students, and so without a corporate battalion of servers to fall back on, the service only offers 2GB of storage compared to Live Mesh’s 5GB – but that’s still more than ample for sharing a selection of everyday files and folders that you want to access from anywhere.

Where Dropbox is streets ahead of Live Mesh is with its web interface. As with Microsoft’s service, you can log in from any web browser to get access to your files, but there’s no Silverlight-esque airs and graces: files are folders are neatly presented, and it’s easy to locate and download (if necessary) the files you need access to without any extra plug-ins.

In the end, the choice is between Microsoft’s powerful but slightly over-powering software, or a more nimble and lightweight rival. We’ve been here before, haven’t we?