A few features from Windows Vista and previous versions aren't included or enabled in Windows 7 by default:
- Outlook Express / Windows Mail
- Windows Movie Maker
- Windows Messenger / MSN Messenger
Microsoft seem to be pushing this whole Windows Live thing these days, so if you want any of the above features you have to download "Windows Live Essentials" or each application individually (which will prompt you to install the others and will only take no for an answer after asking you about 5 times).
The applications included in Windows Live Essentials are:
- Windows Live Messenger (New name for Windows Messenger / MSN Messenger)
- Windows Live Mail (Replacement for Outlook Express / Windows Mail)
- Windows Live Writer (Some blogging app - I've never seen or used it)
- Windows Live Photo Gallery (Self explanitory)
- Windows Live Movie Maker (New name for Windows Movie Maker)
- Family Safety (Stop your kids / husband looking at p**n)
- Windows Live Toolbar (An annoying browser add-on that makes IE take longer to load just to give you a Windows Live Search function, which you can get anyway by changing your default Search provider to Bing)
- Microsoft Office Outlook Connector (Allows Hotmail access via Microsoft Outlook)
- Office Live Add-in (A toolbar for MS Office that lets you do various uninteresting things)
- Microsoft Silverlight (Essentially Microsoft's own version of Adobe Flash plugin)
I'm not sure of the reasons behind this new direction but I suspect it's either to reduce the number of OS features so that people who don't want them don't have to have them, or it'll be because someone somewhere threatened to sue MS for monopolizing.