A quick post from Channel 10, here is a link you’ll want to share with any college students (or parents of college students) that you know. Window 7 is only $29.99 for those enrolled in a U.S.-based educational institution. To qualify, the student must be taking at least 0.5 course credits and have either an @EDU.com email address or attend one of the institutions listed here. If so, the deal available here, will let them grab the Windows 7 Professional Upgrade edition for digital download. Backup media can be optionally added to the order, too, if desired.

The deal is currently being featured on www.microsoft.com/student, which is a valuable resource for finding great deals on Microsoft software, with links to Office 2010 for $79.95, all the student deals on the Microsoft Store site, all the free downloads fromDreamspark (professional development tools), and more. This almost makes me want to go back to school myself. Well, almost.

Originally I looked at this to give me the ability to convert PDF’s to either ePUb or Mobi format so that I can access and use them on both my iPad and on my Kindle. This is a really convenient function but as I looked more closely at the product it has some really good additional functions that I could use as well.This is really worth a look if you are interested in grabbing content and have it available when and where you want it.

In our beta release, we brought the best of Windows Live Sync and Live Mesh together. With the addition of remote access and cloud storage, we understand that the new program does more than sync files.  So following the beta period, we’ll be using the name Windows Live Mesh going forward, which we feel best reflects our broader goal of allowing you to access your stuff across your devices.

A number of our customers noted the inability to sync hidden files, so we added this support. Another point of feedback was that customers wanted a list of which files were missing in a synced folder. Now when Windows Live Mesh detects missing files, you can easily see the file name and when and where it was last modified.

When syncing files to the cloud, beta participants get 2 GB of synced cloud storage. Only 2% of these participants are using more than 1.5 GB. However, Live Mesh offers 5 GB, and while only a small number of Live Mesh customers use all their space, we want to ease migration and increase the online storage limit from 2 GB to 5 GB.

We’ve made several performance updates to Windows Live Mesh in response to your requests that will provide noticeable improvements to your experience. We worked on cutting the application load time in half and made syncing large numbers of folders and adding multiple devices to a sync folder faster. We’ve optimized both memory and CPU usage during sync activity as well as decreased CPU consumption by as much as 30% when Windows Live Mesh is idle.

So it sounds like we are going to see a merging of the Live Mesh Product with the Live Sync Product. You will have 5GB’s of space to work with hopefully we won’t lose anything from Live Mesh that we have currently (I work out of this product with all of my systems.) So when Microsoft releases the new Live Essentials Products I will be looking closely at what is being provided in these packages.

If you need a little lift these kids will definitely provide one for you. Jump to Twit Live Specials…