Earlier this year, my wife and I took a great vacation to South Africa.  I put together this brief video that shows how we used Windows Live to share our memories from that trip with our friends and family.

South Africa Vacation Story:

The next time you're planning to get away from it all and completely unplug, why not let people know using automated vacation replies?  Just start by selecting "More options..." from the options menu in the upper right corner of the Hotmail page, as shown in the illustration at left.

Next, click on Send automated vacation replies under the Manage your account section:

Then type in your automated reply text.  Don't forget to make sure the checkbox at the bottom of the screen is checked "on" so the automated replies only go to your contacts!

If you have a lot of different photo albums associated with your Windows Live Spaces account (like I do) here's a tip for just highlighting the most recent or special album(s) on your Spaces home page.  In fact, you can do this several times and create different album groups on your home page to show different things (vacations, kids, pets, etc.).

First, click on the Customize button, and select Add Modules, as shown at left.

Next scroll the Modules tab down to the Photos, music, and video section and click on Add next to Photos as shown below.

You'll now have a new photos module added to your main Spaces page.  You need to click Save to keep this new change. 

Now, click on Edit module (shown at left) which will bring up a page (shown below) where you can change the name of this photo group, select just the albums you want to show (even in the order in which you want to show them), and change other display options as well.

When you go back to your main Spaces page, you'll see that new album group with your new title and only the photos you've chosen to display.

Have you ever wanted to record something you were doing on your PC so you could show it to your friends and family?  Maybe it's some cool new way to get something done.  Or maybe it's a set of steps to help someone learn something new.  There have been a variety of different products on the market to do this, both free and at a cost, but I've always found the free ones to be limited and not wanted to pay for the others. 

Now our friends over in Office Labs have recently released a new, free application called Community Clips that can help you record anything on your screen.  It's really easy to install and use, and includes built-in publishing of your videos to MSN Soapbox.  I created this very brief 24 second clip to show you the site and clicking on the install button:

Sample Community Clips Video: 

OK, I admit that's not much of a video, but it was just a test to see how this worked.  It was amazingly simple process and you can try it too, just follow the steps below.

Start by going to the Community Clips site and click the big green button to download the application as shown in the video above.

After the product is installed, get ready to record.  You can record just a single application, a region of the screen, or everything running on your PC.  Just click the small icon in your system try to start recording what you want (or press Windows+Alt+R).  In the illustration below I'm starting to record an instance of Internet Explorer (one of the several things running on my PC):

When you're finished recording, just click the same small icon in the tray and click "Stop Recording" (or press Windows+Alt+T). 

Next, a Window similar to the one shown below will pop up and you can then use the Save button to save your video clip on your PC and then click the Upload button to send your file to MSN Soapbox:

Finally, using Windows Live Writer, you can add that video to any blog post using the Insert Video... command, followed by selecting the new video from MSN Soapbox list for your Windows Live ID.

See how easy it is?  Why not give it a try and show off some of your favorite things you've discovered in Windows Live?  We can't wait to see what you post!