A few years back, if you worked with multiple PCs, like a desktop in your office and a laptop on the road, you ran into a hitch every time you moved back and forth between them – your stuff was always in two different versions in two different places.  This was a real pain.  To solve it, you were either stuck shuttling files between PCs with a flash drive (or a DVD, CD or floppy before that), or emailing the latest version to yourself with a complicated name, like “Presentation for executives FROM LAPTOP V3.doc”.

Today there’s a better solution.  A much, much better solution. It’s called Windows Live Mesh and it’s part of Windows Live Essentials, which you can get absolutely free at download.live.com.   For both myself and Ryan Mesh is a lifesaver – check out the video to see it in action:

As you just saw Mesh does two really incredible things:

  • It rocks at keeping your stuff in sync across multiple PCs: This is how I use Mesh the most, and I talk about it so much that Doug Thomas over at the Office Casual Blog just wrote a post about it.  Make a change on one PC and it propagates across all the others.  Also, Mesh can keep PCs in sync using cloud storage so they don’t need to be turned on at the same time to get updates.
  • It lets you connect to any one of your other PCs and work with it from anywhere:  This is Ryan’s favorite feature.  He travels light and uses the ability to “remote in” to his desktop PC to grab big files if he needs them.

How do you use Mesh to keep your life in sync?

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