*Note: I have blurred the bulk of my contacts names, pictures and information for their privacy.

You can download OutSync from the link above, and installing is quick and painless.  The first time you launch OutSync, it can take a minute or so to even show up.  While you may think you misclicked or perhaps think the app didn’t launch, give it a minute or two depending on the speed of your machine before you get too impatient.

Once OutSync is up and running you’ll see a window like this prompting you to login with your Facebook credentials:

Once you have logged in OutSync will start pulling your friends list ( this can take a while depending on internet connection speed and number of friends ):

Once that’s done you should see something like this:

This window lets you check off contacts that you want to sync and ones that you don’t want to.  The only difficulty I had was that contacts in Outlook and in Facebook have to match EXACTLY.  So, if your friend on Facebook displays a middle initial or their entire middle name, you have to have it like that in Outlook for the match to be made.  I’d like to see the ability to “link” a Facebook profile with an Outlook contact as well, without the name having to be a perfect match, but maybe that’s a future enhancement.

Once you have selected the contacts that you want to sync you press the “Sync” button and the screen will change to something like:

Followed by:

Once that is done you can open up Outlook and see that the matched contacts do indeed have pictures now:

If you have an iPhone that syncs to Outlook or a Windows Mobile phone where you can use ActiveSync, you can easily then sync your Outlook contacts to your phone.

While downloads for the beta have officially been cut off, there are a few other sites on the net you can find it on, just make sure you download the right one for your operating system as there are different versions for Windows XP and Windows Vista/Windows 7, and both also have 32bit and 64 bit variations.

Now, lets take a look at what this looks like once it’s installed:

The first thing you notice after installing Microsoft Security Essentials is that you have a new system icon down by your clock:

As you can see, the little blue castle with the white background is the new icon.  Unfortunately, there is currently a minor bug where upon after restarts the icon doesn’t show up unless you double click the icon on your desktop.  It can lead the user to believe that the software isn’t running and that they system is unprotected.  Hopefully this is something MS can fix before they roll out the software officially.  For those wondering, the software IS running, and you can find it in the task manager.  The executable is msseces.exe.  When you do a scan the system tray icon looks like this: .  A right click option is added to explorer to let you scan files one at a time too

Once you double click on the icon you are presented with the following screen:

This is a very simple page with little user interaction.  If you want to trigger a scan to go off right then, you can select from the 3 options and press the scan now button.  Selecting custom will bring up a window allowing you to choose the drives or folders in which you want scanned. The QUICK option appears to scan the registry, windows, program files and “documents and settings” directories.  It DOES seem to deep scan compressed exe’s ( the cabs/zips within them ) and zip files. I have seen it churn away on large compressed files doing it’s thing.

From there we go to the Update Tab:

The Update Tab does just what you would expect.  It checks the Microsoft servers for new Spyware and Virus definitions.  Definitions are what the software uses to compare files against their database to flag as either a potential virus or spyware.  Think of it kind of like fingerprint matching.

The History Tab:

Previously I was running the AVG Free Anti-Virus ( AVG ) software. Upon downloading MSE, I uninstalled AVG and installed MSE. I immediately ran MSE and it found 1 virus and got rid of it.  Yes, it was only a javascript vulnerability and I use FireFox to attempt to limit those, but it is still interesting that MSE immediately found something that AVG missed.  I think I have to do a full scan soon.  Depending on the type of infection you can Remove the item ( which in this case MSE did for me ) or Allow the item if you know it is a false positive. There doesn’t seem to be a “clean” function that many anti-virus softwares have, but this could be because the fact the software is in beta.

Now to dive into the settings of MSE.  You are given a lot of options, so I’m going to just list them as most of them you’ll never want to change except for Scheduled Scans and adding the scan of Removeable Drives.

Overall MSE has all the starts to compete with the big boys and at a fraction of the cost.  What will MSE cost?  NOTHING.  MSE is planned to be a FREE replacement to those paying $50 a year for Microsoft One Care.  The Virus and Spyware definitions are scheduled to be updated as often as 3x a day, so you wouldn’t go longer than 8 hours without having access to an update.  The actual software is planned to be updated through Windows Update and assuming that you have Windows Updates scheduled to run every week like you should, then you should pick up all your updates automagically.

http://net.tutsplus.com/articles/web-roundups/20-tools-to-make-the-life-of-a-web-developer-easier/

OpenProj – Basically a free version of Microsoft Project, used to make schedules for projects.

Pdfsam – PDF Split and Merge – While CutePDF has the ability to create PDF files, it can’t edit them once they’re already created. This little gem is perfect for merging 2 PDFs into one, or splitting one into 2. It’s a simple program and maybe for a very specific purpose, but useful nonetheless.

http://www.blender.org/

• Microsoft Office – OpenOffice
• Antivirus Software: AVG Antivirus
• Photoshop – GIMP
• Illustrator – Inkscape
• Adobe Acrobat – CutePDF (Although this functionality is built into OpenOffice)
• Antispam: Ad-aware Free Version
• Microsoft Frontpage/Adobe Dreamweaver – Kompozer

I’ll add more as I find them, but if you have any suggestions, post them!