A few weeks ago as I changed my Gmail/Google Talk address over to my preferred ‘talk@ben-ward.co.uk’ Jabber account (which is hosted on Dreamhost). Someone told me at the time that I could change my MSN Messenger address too and that it would magically transfer across all my contacts…
Well, I updated my Passport and that too should now identify me as ‘talk@ben-ward.co.uk’ (it was formerly ‘msn@ben-ward.co.uk’). It did claim that all my contacts would be transferred over to the new address but seeing as every single MSN messenger contact went offline after I made the change, I’m a little unconvinced.
I will attempt to fix it at this end, but if you’re wanting to get hold of me you may just want to save waiting and add talk@ben-ward.co.uk to your contact list.
Update: Having completely rebuilt my contact list it seems to be working again. I heartily recommend against renaming your MSN Passport.
Update: Since writing this post I get a lot of people adding me to their MSN list asking for help with changing their username, password, email address the works. I’m not really an expert on such matters and as of March 17th 2007 I discovered that Microsoft have changed their Account Settings page such that it only displays fully in Internet Explorer 6 on Windows. I run a Mac and so have no instant access to IE6. I’m afraid this means I’m no-longer able to provide any advice on working with Live Accounts, Passports, MSNs or whatever Microsoft rebrand them to next week. Thanks.
Update: If you’ve arrived here from XBox.com or a search engine looking for help changing your MSN username or password, you need to know that this isn’t a support forum, nor was this entry really written as a ‘how to’ piece. Since I get so many comments asking for help though, you should check the following links:
Log in to account.live.com and you’ll be presented with an Account Summary dashboard. From there, you can click ‘change’ next to your account username (email address) or click ‘change’ next to the asterisks representing your password.
Note that you cannot change your Live ID username (email address) if you use a Hotmail account. If you want a different sign-in name and use Hotmail to log in now, you need to register a new account.
Ben is a 24 year old Web Developer from Cambridge and is a computing graduate of the University of Manchester.