If you arrived late to the Hotmail party, you probably got stuck with a crazy email address, like jim22576@hotmail.com. If you’d like to try again, you might be interested to know that Microsoft “went live” with their “Windows Live” services a couple of days ago. Part of those services include Windows Live Hotmail, which is a Hotmail account with a much-improved interface. In fact, it’s really close to Microsoft’s Outlook Web Access product… which really kicks ass!
Anyway, as part of the rollout, they’re offering @live.com email addresses. You can’t “upgrade” your existing @hotmail.com account to an @live.com one, but you can always try and see if your name hasn’t been taken yet. And even if it has, you can possibly “move down the list” and become jim101@live.com instead of jim22576@hotmail.com.
Windows Live Hotmail offers 5GB of storage and also has a nifty Contacts Import Wizard if you use Outlook or Outlook Express.
Sign up for a live.com email address by clicking here. For best results, use Internet Explorer to do the sign up; people using Firefox (and even Firefox with the IE Tab extension) are reporting error messages when signing up.