Windows Live Essentials 2011 final version was released few days back and we have written about the offline installer for the complete suite. The complete offline installer includes all the applications like Writer, Messenger, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker etc and comes with a download size of around 160MB. But in case you want the offline installers for each of the Windows Live Programs, you can still get it. The links are shared at the bottom of this post, but before you get to the links, we would like to share how we arrived at the links. We tried installing the web set up of Live Essentials and obviously the web set up downloads each of the program from web and installs it. Windows Live Essentials installer has logs which installing the complete suite, which can be found in the following location.
For Windows 7/Vista (Program Data is a hidden folder, make sure you have set hidden folders to visible).
C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\WLSetup\Logs
For Windows XP
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\WLSetup\Logs
In the Logs folder, open the last accessed file, which would have the same date when you installed the web set up. If you carefully read the logs, you can actually find the links from where the web installer downloads each of the program. Here are some examples below.
In the image above, you can see the actual link from where the installer downloads Messenger 2011.
The above image shows the link for photo gallery. Similarly, you can see the links for all the applications included in WL Essentials separately using the logs. One important thing to note here is that all the files are in .cab format. We will tell you how to extract from cab.
So finally we have arrived at the separate offline installers for each of the application, here they are;
Photo Gallery 2011 (11.1 MB)
Movie Maker 2011 (4.02 MB)
Messenger 2011 (7.64 MB)
Windows Live Writer 2011 (2.65 MB)
Windows Live Mail 2011 (4.98 MB)
Bing Bar (6.2 MB)
Messenger Companion (1.7MB)
Live Mesh (6.01 MB)
Family Safety (4.8 MB)
Outlook Connector Pack (2.2 MB)
There are many additional files needed for installing Windows Live Essentials like DirectX, Visual Studio runtime etc. There are also available in the log file, but we have not included them in the links.
Once you have downloaded the cab files, you need to extract it and for that the best free tool is 7-Zip, download and install this free tool. Once installed, right click on the cab file and select 7-Zip-> Open Archive from the context menu. You might need to extract more than one levels to get hold of the installer as there are multiple archives inside the file.
Once extracted, you can see all the installers in .msi format. Although the offline set up which is around 160MB allows you to install programs separately, you still need to download the 160 MB files, but with the offline installers for separate programs you need to download only the ones you need.
This was an experimental work and might not work in some cases, in case you find any issues with the installer, do drop a comment.
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