It was trumpeted as being better than Macs at handling photos recently, and if you want to find out if that’s true, you’ll be glad to hear that Microsoft has officially released the full series of Windows Live Essentials betas, and it’s now open to public testing. The improvements include tighter social networking integration in Photo Gallery and Messenger. The Photo Gallery program in particular has received quite a number of pretty cool enhancements, allowing users to create composite images or process files using batch editing. The Windows Live Essentials betas are now available as a free download for Windows 7 and Windows Vista users.