Microsoft not compatible with Microsoft?

Microsoft live mail, part of Microsoft Live Essentials offers no support for getting your email, calendars and contacts from exchange 2007!

Not only am I shocked that Windows 7 comes with no email client out of the box, but it isn't even compatible with its own company's mail, calandaring and contacts solution. On my Mac it takes just a couple of clicks to set up exchange support for Apple mail, iCal and Address book all of which are available out of the box. Even Linux in its Ubuntu form comes with evolution mail supporting exchange mail, calendars and contacts.

Further more, isn't the clue in the name? Windows live essentials, i.e. essential apps, i.e. a bloody email client! So in an attempt to slim down Windows 7 which is admittedly much slimmer than Vista but nowhere near as slim as OSX or Ubuntu, Microsoft have chosen to axe essential apps resulting in a much poorer out of box experience.

I like Windows 7, it is certainly the best Windows yet with much to commend. But this just shows that the words 'joined up thinking' and 'Microsoft' cannot be used in the same sentence!

Microsoft Security Essentials

Although I have not yet thrown live viruses at Microsoft's new security essentials virus protection software, initial results have been very good indeed. Microsoft Security Essentials takes only a small amount of memory whilst running, system and file scanning is fast, real-time protection uses minimal system resources, and it has a very efficient virus definitions update process.

I have replaced AVG (free) with Microsoft security essentials and have noticed a big improvement in the speed and responsiveness of the system. So much so, that my aging Sony Vaio with 1gb of RAM has suddenly become a very usable system running Windows 7 and Microsoft security essentials.

Now to set up a walled garden virtual machine environment, and throw some viruses at it to see if anything sticks. If the results are good I can see little point PC sellers pushing the majority of customers to buy 3rd party security suites which generally cripple the computers they run on. Although I doubt that will stop them trying.