Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

From the very first day I discovered FolderShare, created by Byte Taxi and later purchased by Microsoft and re-named Live Sync, it's been a transformational technology for me - literally changing the way I'm able to work on multiple devices. Over the years, Live Sync has been ignored, improved, then ignored again - a clear sign that the leadership at Microsoft didn't know what to do with it. And the obvious overlap with Live Mesh didn't help its cause. Things seemed to be getting better about a year ago when Live Sync really started to get some effort put into it, but took a drastic turn for the worse when the Live Sync beta came out in June.

FolderShare was truly dead; the lightweight, super-fast client was replaced by the heavy and slow Live Mesh client. Worse, the performance issues - specifically, the hard drive access load - virtually lock up several of my computers when a sync is happening (and were talking about a Core i7 system with 6 GB of RAM in one instance). It wasn't all bad news though - the 20,000 file library limit was raised to 100,000, so I was finally able to re-unite my photo collection. All in all though, I've been very disappointed in the performance of the new Live Sync client. Read more...