Windows Live Essentials wave 4 came out in beta last week, but I’ve just gotten it installed today. I’ve been toying around with it a bit, and I’d like to share some of my first impressions on the betas.

Image via Sizzled Core

If Microsoft doesn't, there's sure to be some folk who will. In fact, some people already are working on pulling the next version of Windows Media Player out of the public Windows 7 beta, and getting it to work with Vista.

Well, this will teach me to trust the official Windows Vista help website. After running the Live Installer to bring myself up to the Live Writer and Live Photo Gallery wave 3 betas (and update Live Messenger to the latest, although that was unsuccessful), I had to restart my computer because Windows Update also decided to do its magic today. The machine restarts, I log in, and… “User profile cannot be loaded.”

Uh oh, what?

Image via Wikipedia

Windows Photo Gallery has great metadata support. It supports hierarchical tagging, makes it easy to rename and caption photos, and even allows for adjusting the date and time that a photo was taken. For all this, it rocks, especially if all you have are JPEG images.