Free Space

• Live Mail/Hotmail provide at this moment in time 5GB of storage space.
• The basic Yahoo! Mail package you receive unlimited storage space!
• Gmail claim that their storage space is always increasing and at time of writing the storage space is around 6.75GB.
• The winner of the ‘Free Space’ award must be Yahoo! Mail simply because the space is unlimited!

Is there a paid for upgrade?

• Gmail provide two upgrades, one that you must pay for (Premier Edition) and the other which is free (Education Edition). The Premier Edition is aimed at Small Businesses and Enterprises. It costs £25 a year.
• Live Mail/Hotmail have no upgrades which is a huge shame.
• Yahoo! Mail have 3 upgrades, Yahoo! Mail Plus, Yahoo! Mail Personal Address and Yahoo! Business Email. Yahoo! Mail Plus is around £10 a year (under £1 per month). Yahoo! Mail Personal Address is around £17.50 per year (under £1.50 per month). Yahoo! Business Email costs just under £5 a month plus a month of set up fee of £12.50.
• I personally haven’t used any of the upgrades because the basic packages are perfectly adequate for me, however from looking at all the details of the packages I think that Gmail provides the best upgrade packages. Therefore Gmail wins the ‘Upgrade’ award!

Features-There are hundreds of features that all of the free packages provide and if I was to write about all of them you’d be here for hours, so click on the following applicable link for each provider to find out more about the features of, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail and Live Mail/Hotmail.

• My favourite feature of Yahoo! Mail is that on the main screen you have tabs for the different folders/messages etc that you have open. Also there is a home tab which has the latest news/sport/entertainment and finance news.
• My favourite feature of Gmail is the fact that you can use so many applications with just one account. It’s worth getting an account just to use the applications!
• And finally my favourite feature of Live Mail/Hotmail is how easy it is to connect with Microsoft Office Outlook.

Easy to use/Stylish interface -

• In my opinion Windows Live Mail/Hotmail has a very easy to use interface and it is quite stylish too! You can change the colour of your account to your own preference.
• Yahoo! Mail is easy to use too and since its recent face lift is far more stylish but you don’t have the option to personalize it like Live Mail/Hotmail.
• I feel that Gmail is easy to use but is in need of a redesign to keep up with the trends as some people judge things on looks and Gmail certainly would not win!
• The winner of the ‘Easy to use/Stylish Interface’ Award is Windows Live Mail/Hotmail!

Is it cluttered with Ad’s? – So often you go into an email account you get annoying.

• Gmail has no adverts at all which is very good.
• Yahoo! Mail has one large advert and two very small adverts, none of them are in the way but they’re still there!
• Live Mail/Hotmail has on very large advert going across the screen which is distracting.
• Therefore Gmail wins the ‘Ad’ Award!

Are there many addresses free? -

• Yahoo! Mail and Gmail have a limited number of addresses left compared to Live Mail/Hotmail.
• Live Mail has recently been released so there are loads of address names still free!
• Live Mail/Hotmail has to win the ‘Addresses Free’ award!

Can you access your mail from your mobile?

• With a Gmail account you can access your mail very easily. You can also access other Google applications, for example: Search, Maps, Picasa, You Tube, Calender and News. If you’re interested visit ‘Google Mobile‘.
• You can get Live Mail/Hotmail on your mobile, however it costs you to send emails on top of your mobile Internet providers charges (£1 for 8 Emails). If you’re interested visit ‘Mobile Hotmail‘. You can also get MSN Messenger on your mobile phone.
• Yahoo! Mail also is available via your mobile. It looks very similar to the web based version which you’re used to. Like Gmail and Live Mail/Hotmail you can also get many applications on the internet too. For example, Messenger, Flickr, News, Sports and Entertainment. For more info visit ‘Yahoo! Mobile‘.
• I think that it is a joint win for Gmail and Yahoo! Mail for the ‘Mobile Access’ award.

In conclusion, it all comes down to personal choice and what you really need. If your computer skills are very limited and need something simple go for Gmail. If you want something stylish and also very simple to use go for Live Mail/Hotmail. If you want an account which is easy to use and you feel in the future you may want to upgrade go for Yahoo! Mail.

If there are anymore areas that you’d like us to compare please let us know!

You can upgrade Yahoo Mail from the basic free version to ‘Yahoo! Mail Plus‘, ‘Yahoo! Business Mail‘ and you can also purchase a package called ‘Yahoo! Mail Personal Address‘.

The Basic Free Yahoo! Mail has many features for example:

• Yahoo! Mail will automatically check for new messages.
• You can drag and drop items into folders which makes organisation easier than ever!
• Access your email on your mobile phone
• Also, recently Yahoo! have developed and integrated a way to send/receive Instant Messages, to friends that are online, straight from your Yahoo! Mail account.
• 10MB Message Size
• 15 Spam Filters
• SpamGuard (Spam Protection)
• There is also a features page which you can visit to see more!

Yahoo! Mail Plus has the features above, plus the following:

• 20MB Message Size instead of 10MB.
• 50 Filters instead of 15.
• SpamGuard Plus(Spam Protection) instead of just Spam Guard
• No account expiration
• However…this all does come at a price! On the website it is down as $19.99 a year which is just under $2.00 per month. This works out at the current exchange rate to be around £10.00 a year which is under £1.00 per month!
• For more info click here

Yahoo! Mail Personal Address basically lets you majorly personalize your email account,

• It includes 5 email addresses
• You can personalize your email address in the format ‘name@your-name.com’.
• The service also has an advanced anti-virus protection.
• To find out more click here.
• All this is for $35 a year which is less than $3 a month! At today’s current exchange rate that works out at around £17.50 a year and less than £1.50 a month!

Finally Yahoo! Business Email has pretty much all of the previously names features and more:

• Award-winning spam and security protection
• Easy-to-use and powerful main interface
• 24/7 Free Customer Support
• For info click here.
• At today’s current exchange rate this will cost you for the basic package just under £5 a month. However you will need to pay a set up fee of around £12.50.

From looking at all the Yahoo! Mail products I have discovered that they provide a package that can suit most people’s needs, however the downside of it all is that some of it comes at a price. It’s just down to the user to decide if they really need all the extras or not, as the basic package is adequate for most people.

I think I have mentioned in past blogs either here on on Brandstar.co.uk that I was using the pre-release of Vista codenamed longhorn and thought it was good although wasn’t completely convinced. When Vista was fully released to the public at the beginning of 2007 I moved over to Vista on my existing system.

Installing Vista Business on my XP System

I didn’t want to have to buy a new machine just to use Vista, mainly because I didn’t know if it would be worthwhile. Instead I decided to install it on my existing machine that was running XP fairly well. There begun a number of problems. Firstly the graphics card drivers didn’t work properly so I had to replace the graphics card (took two attempts!) and then stability did seem to be an issue although I think that was due to the XPC motherboard as I was aware of some problems with them at the time.

Despite those problems, what I had seen of Vista, I liked but I needed in the office something more stable than this XPC machine that would randomly freeze. So I bought a Dell Vostro Desktop. Intel Core 2 Duo 2.33GHz, 4GB Ram, 200GB Hard Disk etc. In short..a nice machine!

Vista on a nice new PC

With this machine built for Vista it had hardware in it that I knew would be compatible and stable and so I thought a good ground to really begin using Vista properly.

I have to confess that I was surprised when I found all my existing hardware to be compatible with Vista. I know Microsoft raved about the compatibility but that was just marketing surely! My Canon IP5300 printer had drivers I could download, the Samsung ML-1210 works nicely, both Epson scanners worked too!

Some people say – “It is important that my digital camera works”. You rarely need drivers for your digital camera to work on XP or Vista, let alone the bloated software that comes with them. Might I suggest that the next time you get a digi camera you take a photo and plug the camera in…see what happens! I think you will be surprised!

It was a new OS so there were obviously things to learn, the first one for me being how to overcome networking issues. Turns out you have to use Network and Sharing Center and turn on things like Network Discovery, File/Printer Sharing etc. Once you have sussed that and set the Vista machine up on the right workgroup then my experience so far has been good. Set it up and do a reboot…away you go!

Secure…Really? - Microsoft’s sales team spent goodness knows how long telling us how much more secure Vista will be compared to XP. I have to be honest despite knowing how much time and effort had gone into testing the OS before release I was still a tiny bit sceptical. Having said that..It turns out that Microsoft might actually have been telling the truth! From what I have read the reported security problems with Vista is not only way below XP’s security vulnerabilities upon release but is also beating other brands of OS as well! What’s more, my experiences on my own Vista machines as well as clients match their findings. Well done Microsoft!

Crash, Hang, Reboot - How is the stability. Well I am yet to see a blue screen on Vista, anyone got a screenshot to prove they exist? Seriously, I am sure they do exist. I am just yet to see one. Because I access my desktop remotely all the time it tends to get left on and it does so quite happily. The only thing that does cause it to shutdown against my will are the powercuts we randomly get around here and that isn’t really Vista’s fault! When I last checked how long my Vista machine had been up and running for, it was 21days, and still going strong. I only rebooted because I installed an application that wanted a reboot.

It has only been in the last week that I have actually seen Vista crash, which isn’t bad after working on it for a year or more. That was on a clients machine and it actually turned out to be a problem with the storage controller and not Vista. The other crash I have seen on Vista happened last week and that was caused by a fault with a CD rather than Vista.

So is this a perfect Operating System then..? Well..No, I don’t believe in such a thing. Vista isn’t perfect, if it was they wouldn’t be releasing Service Pack 1 for it in March. However the things that I have come across more than once with Vista that make it not quite perfect are these:

• Windows Mail – There is a bug in this that will randomly lock out and corrupt the outbox mail folder. There is a way round it but you loose any unreadable messages from the outbox. If you are struggling with this we wrote about it on Brandstar along with the fix, check out the Brandstar Site for details.
• Windows Mail – An issue, not really a bug with Windows Mail this time, but a little disappointment is that there is no UK dictionary.
• Office 2003 doesn’t fully work with Vista. There are the odd little bugs here and there which annoy more than anything in Office 2003 running on Vista. The one I found on a users machine was that they couldn’t use Word to edit their signature in Outlook. Small but annoying. Office 2007 I have to say is better and works perfectly on Vista, but that’s not really the point!
• Bit-Locker only on Vista Ultimate – In my opinion the Business version of Vista should have the Bit-Locker facility as well. I appreciate Microsoft’s argument that Ultimate has to have something ‘extra’ to warrant having that version but surely just having all the components of Premium and Business is enough?

They are the things that come to mind, and although there might be one or two more I don’t really think there is anything terribly worrying that should put users off this Operating System.

Am I recommending people get Vista?

The answer is yes and no. Much like when it was first released I don’t recommend upgrading your machine unless you bought it as “Vista Ready”. If you are buying a new machine then I wouldn’t even think of advising you against Vista! My most important advice. Make sure your computer peripherals are compatible with Vista!

I hope this has helped, particularly if you are on the edge of buying Vista. So far Vista has been very well taken up but at the same time there are still many users uncertain about making the change, and understandably as the OS is still pretty young. But with the first milestone of a year in use and no real scares I think Vista will only become more and more popular. I think this year will be an important one for Vista!