Windows Live Essentials 2012

Windows Live Essentials 2012 (formerly known as Windows Live and Windows Live Installer) is a useful suite that helps you deploy some of the most popular Microsoft-vetted apps of old for cloud storage, email, parental control, blogging, instant messaging, photo and video editing, just to name a few.

These are as follows: Windows Live Family Safety, Windows Live Mail, Windows Movie Maker, Windows Photo Gallery, Windows Live Writer, OneDrive, and Windows Live Messenger.

It's quite important to be aware of the fact that since January 10, 2017, Windows Live Essentials 2012 is no longer officially supported by Microsoft. Having said that, it's worth pointing out that most of the apps still work surprisingly well, even on newer iterations such as Windows 10 and Windows 8 (Windows 7 is supported, as well).

However, as you can imagine, you might encounter a few niggles here and there (for example, some email service providers have updated their  protocols for improved security and reliability, and these might not work with Live Mail), which is why you will definitely find the following Release Notes/Troubleshooting page to be of great use.

Apart from the basic requirements thoroughly listed on our website, most of the included apps might require full administration rights and a valid Microsoft account in order to be installed and configured.

With that out of the way, simply run the installer and choose one of the two provided options: either install all the included apps with a single mouse click or individually select them from the list.

To end with, if you've moved on to newer versions of Windows, but you still prefer some of slightly oldschool Microsoft apps like Photo Makes, Photo Gallery, Live Writer, and Live Messenger, then it's definitely recommended that you download Windows Live Essentials 2012 and conveniently install them from the same place.