Thursday, August 14, 2008

Simplify your Favorites Across Computers

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I have three different computers I use on a regular basis.  Favorites were useless to me because when I marked something on the web, I never knew if I was going to be using that computer the next time I wanted it.  I discovered Windows Live Favorites

Windows Live Favorites keeps your favorites up on a Windows Live server on the Internet, benefits to that? (1) they are backed up, and (2) they can be synced to each computer you use. It's Easy!

Simply install the Windows Live Tool bar from Get Live on each of your computers, it plugs into IE.  Don't worry, if you're not bought into Windows Live Search yet, you can change the search engine it uses, but Windows Live, it's improved a lot!

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Your favorites are automatically synced to the Live Favorite service, and then down to each other computer that has the tool bar installed.  Bingo! just like that, your favorites are in sync across all your computers.

As an added bonus, there are sites, such as ZDNet that allow you to add links directly into your favorites.

But wait! It gets better!

If you use Windows Live Spaces, you can choose which favorites to share with your friends.  You add the Favorite Widget, then the favorites you share are visible to all your viewers.

If anything has simplified my life, it's been the ability to have my favorites on all my PCs...


3 comments:

Wallyb132 said...

Or!

you can use Firefox with one of the many bookmark sync add-on's, such as Foxmarks. You get all the same functionality as the Windows Live Favorites, without having to add yet another toolbar to IE.

But wait folks! there's more! As a special gift, you will also receive web access to all your bookmarks, via your favorite browser, absolutely free!

Have you ever been working on a clients computer and needed access to your bookmarks, but didnt want to sync all your personal bookmarks to said computer, or the computer uses a different browser, such as IE or Opera? No problem, just access your bookmarks thru the myfoxmarks.com portal, 24/7 from any browser anywhere in the world. all free of charge!

And for the naysayers who refuse to use Firefox due to its lack of ActiveX support, there is a solution for that as well, just download and install the IETab add-on for Firefox, it gives you the ability to use the IE rendering engine from within Firefox, including full ActiveX support. Windows update or Trend Micro CSM management console from within Firefox, who would've thunk it!

Sean Daniel said...

Great Point Wally,

You can access your IE Favorites from http://favorites.live.com from any computer. I forgot that part.

Thanks for your help with Firefox, I'm not completely up to speed, good to know you can do it with firefox too, it's a great feature.

Thanks for sharing!

/.er said...

The toolbar doesn't install on w2008 x64 :(