Redmond, Washington — Hold onto your breaths, Windows Live enthusiasts; software maker Microsoft over the weekend has decided to make a bunch of changes to its Live Sync service including reverting that decision, and the combined program will now be called Windows Live Mesh before it is released in final form this fall, and raise Mesh’s storage limit to 5 Gbytes of free cloud storage.
Many of the changes, which Microsoft announced over the weekend, are good ones — Microsoft’s two sync offerings — Windows Live Sync and Windows Live Mesh were merged into a single program called Windows Live Sync beta for the beta of Windows Live Essentials.
The decision to change the name was appealed by many of the folks who have been beta-testing what was formerly known as Live Mesh for the past couple of years.
Surprisingly, it is more than just a name change, and some enhanced attributes will be added to Live Mesh once the Windows Live Essentials 2011 beta is complete.
The significant changes to Windows Live Mesh include performance improvements: Allison O’Mahony, Principal Program Manager Lead, Devices & Roaming at Microsoft listed a few noteworthy additions to the service Friday.
“We worked on cutting the application load time in half and made syncing large numbers of folders and adding multiple devices to a sync folder faster,” O’Mahony, wrote in a blog post. “We have optimized both memory and CPU usage during sync activity as well as decreased CPU consumption by as much as 30% when Windows Live Mesh is idle.”
First, users will be able to sync hidden files, and keep track of files missing between synced devices. Secondly, Cloud storage will be bumped up from 2GB to 5GB. This storage is completely separate from SkyDrive and Live Hotmail storage, but O’Mahony said the team will consider ways to improve communication between these different services in the future.
In combining the two services, Microsoft is anticipating to make things simpler, though naming has been a challenge. With either name, Microsoft has a great task to instruct users about what the service is all about, says Dharmesh Mehta, a director in the Windows Live group.
“There were good things about both of them,” Mehta said of the two names. “Both of our brands we would have had to build with consumers.”
The service will cater to both PCs and Macs (those running Mac OS X 10.5 or later), but not any other devices, at least for now, Mehta said. Live Mesh will be released as part of the Windows Live Essentials 2011 suite that is due this fall and includes Windows Live Movie Maker, Windows Live Photo Gallery, Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Writer, and other programs.