Garage & Updates

We have a brand new version of Skype for you all – Skype 4.2 Gold for Windows.

Start downloading it now.

Skype 4.2 Gold for Windows brings to you:
* Video calling – support for 720p video calling with new encoding web-cameras, which will be on market soon and improved overall video calling experience.
* Skype Access – a neat way to use Wifi when you’re on the go
* Call Quality Indicator – a tool letting you know what could be causing trouble in your calls
* Client alerts – all the messages from Skype and authorization request are in one single place now, straight in Skype.
* Improved contact importers – even more possibilities to import contacts into Skype
* Call Transfer – now you can transfer your incoming or ongoing calls to someone else easily
* Windows 7 support – support for new Windows 7 features such as jump list.

In addition we have fixed a long list of issues found in previous versions and in 4.2 public Beta release.
I would like to thank everyone who has filed their issue reports about Skype 4.2 Beta for Windows on our public issue tracker or discussed things on our forums. Please continue to do so if you should encounter anything which feels odd for you in Skype.

Especially I would like to thank our Closed Beta testers who have been enormous help for us in delivering this release to you, finding bugs and pushing us to fix every single one of them. Especially Claudius Henrichs and Jana Sobotkova who have been going over every single item in Skype many times. Artur Räpp who helped a lot on the accessibility frontier to make sure that blind persons will have a good usability waiting for them. Last but, not least Carlo Di Gregorio and Nicolas Vanhaute who are the most hardcore video testers I have ever seen.

Unfortunately the release version 4.2.0.152 has also some known issues in. We are working hard on fixing them.

Full release notes for the release are:

Known issues:
* Skype may experience problems when running Cyberlink YouCam video decoration software.
Current Solution: Upgrade Cyberlink YouCam to version 3 or close the software before making Skype video calls.
* In some rare cases when sending video from a Microsoft LifeCam VX-3000, the local preview may freeze. The other side will still receive video normally.
Current Solution: None available at this time
* When on a video call to Asus Videophone users the local video preview might freeze and the other side sees a green still image after some time into call.
Current Solution: Redial the video call.
* The Skype video snapshots feature is not working on Windows XP SP3.
Current Solution: None available at this time
* The High Quality Video logo sometimes flashes during a video call.
Current Solution: None available at this time
* It rarely happens that calls are not successful when two users call each other at exactly the same time
Current Solution: None available at this time
* The microphone mute functionality is not restored after finishing a Skype call when using Windows Vista.
Current Solution: None available at this moment, this is Windows Vista behavior.
* The Call Quality Indicator shows medium quality for web-cameras although it should show high quality.
Current Solution: None available at this time
* The Call Quality Indicator shows a false error message that your webcam is in use by other application, even if it is not in use anymore.
Current Solution: Ignore the message.
* The preferred microphone settings are not saved when the device is set from the Call Quality Indicator device selection list.
Current Solution: Select the microphone from Tools->Options instead
* Transferring a call message, on calls which originated from an older Skype version, is not shown to the caller.
Current Solution: None available at this time
* Transferring a call to a phone contact and Skype user at the same time will cause the call to disconnect for the Skype user when the phone contact answers the call.
Current Solution: None available at this time
* Only one field change is saved when editing phone contacts.
Current Solution: For saving more than one field, editing must be repeated.
* Screen Sharing from Skype 4.2 to Skype 4.0 or lower does not show video to the receiver if their computer has Pentium 4 or Pentium 3 processor.
Current Solution: Upgrade the receivers Skype to latest version.
* The Skype Access connection offering does not pop-up correctly when trying to connect to supported hotspot after starting Skype up.
Current Solution: Connect to supported Wifi hotspot before running Skype.
* No warning message is being displayed when closing a conversation with the close button in compact mode.
Current Solution: None available at this time
* The automatic ‘Away’ status setting doesn’t work if it has been set a long time ago.
Current Solution: Change the auto away time in options to something else and then back.
* Browsing history is slow while running Jaws.
Current Solution: None available at this time
* Skype fails to detect some screen readers when they are started after running Skype. Workaround: restart Skype.
Current Solution: None available at this time
* Users with screen readers may have problems noticing the new authorization requests in the Notification tab.
Current Solution: None available at this time
* Skype browser plugins for Internet Explorer and Firefox ignore meta tag not to highlight phone numbers.
Current Solution: None available at this time
* When a user opens their web browser with no network connectivity, Skype displays an error message that SkypeNames.exe wants to use Skype. This happens when opening Firefox for the first time after installing Skype with the IE and Firefox add-ons.
Current Solution: None available at this time
* Skype’s Firefox browser plugin can not be uninstalled from the Firefox Extensions panel on Windows Vista and 7.
Current Solution: Uninstall Skype web features from Add or Remove programs dialogue.
* The Skype browser plugin highlights phone numbers and names while creating content on various popular websites.
Current Solution: Disable Skype browser plugins on affected webpages.
* DailyMotion videos which have been added to a mood message are not being displayed to other contacts.
Current Solution: None available at this time
* The country drop down list in the call phones tab is not localized to Russian.
Current Solution: None available at this time
* Having “IM Magician” installed on your computer may cause Skype to crash.
Current Solution: If you are affected by this issue then please uninstall “IM Magican” until the vendor provides patch for this issue.
* Netbooks can experience problems displaying some of the Skype windows.
Current Solution: None available at this time
* Certain graphical components may be misaligned when running Skype with a high graphics DPI setting.
Current Solution: None available at this time

Improvements:
* Improved video quality in low bandwidth conditions
* Skype now supports 720p video calls with the new encoding web-cameras that will available soon
* Incoming authorization requests are now shown when a users returns to Skype after having been away for a while
* The Video call button is now always visible, even if there isn’t a web camera detected.
* The default privacy settings for Instant Messages changed from “anyone” to “people in my contact list only”
* Improved contact importers
* Improved the localization of Arabic and Brazilian Portuguese

Fixed issues:
* Holding and resuming a video call sometimes caused a black screen to appear instead of the actual video.
* An Asus GSB virtual video device used for capturing a screen caused Skype to freeze when attempting to make a call.
* Skype rarely crashed when clicking the “show messages from” button during a video call.
* Video froze on specific hardware for user.
* An incoming call from a mobile to an online number was not mapped to the Skype contact that the mobile number was saved for.
* When user received a call and wanted to transfer the call to a Skype contacts phone number, the number could be selected from the drop-down menu, but the call still went through to the contact’s Skype account.
* Users on the “lite version of Skype” were displayed as “Unknown” in Conference calls.
* The “Learn about call quality” section was empty when viewing the client in Portuguese Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese.
* A big ‘Test now’ button that was displayed during a call, did not work.
* The Call Quality Indicator showed a misleading message: “Your speakers seem to be working fine”.
* The Call Quality Indicator displayed an empty message about the computer speed whit computer that ran on batteries.
* Skype sometimes displayed double call failure messages. For example when a user had no credits and a slow computer while making a call to a phone.
* The Call Quality Indicator showed the webcam quality for phone contacts.
* When screen sharing in full screen mode the cursor sometimes blinked.
* It was possible to start screen sharing while a call was on hold.
* The online presence status was not accessible when using screen readers.
* It was not possible to access all the items on the welcome screen when using a keyboard.
* Browsing the ‘Getting started Wizard’ with a keyboard was not working properly.
* The keyboard command ‘alt+spacebar’ did not respond correctly.
* Dragging and dropping contacts to the contact categories sometimes caused user interface distortion.
* It was sometimes not possible to scroll in the conversation list with mouse.
* When hovering over the file transfer icon or status text, the displayed tooltip wasn’t updated.
* When changing the language while being on the history panel, not all text was changed to the new language.
* Emoticons were not animated in the emoticon selection list.
* The notification count indicator changed only when the notification tab was opened while being in the ‘Do not disturb’ mode.
* Online notifications were blinking when more than three contacts came online at the same time.
* The contact phone number dropdown menu showed question marks in non-Latin languages.
* The ‘get new pictures’ link was being re-directed to the English language webpage.
* Skype’s audio settings were sometimes being reset after Skype was restarted.
* Sent SMS’ showed the Skype username instead of the phone number.
* The installer sometimes didn’t install or even offered to install the Firefox browser plug-in even though Firefox was installed on a users computer.
* With Internet Explorer it was possible to open multiple settings dialogs by clicking on the toolbar button several times.
* With Internet Explorer it was impossible to open the settings dialog on some websites where phone number recognition is blocked.
* With Internet Explorer the phone number dropdown appeared in the wrong position.
* Internet Explorer and Firefox web pages with very high number of phone numbers some times made the browser freeze and certain phone numbers would appear to be free even though they were not.
* The tooltip for free phone numbers was wrong on Internet Explorer and Firefox.
* With Internet Explorer and Firefox, when sending an SMS message to a recognized Outlook contact a call was initiated instead of an SMS message.
* Phone numbers were sometimes being duplicated on certain pages, highlighting appeared twice for the same number.
* Viewing videos from a contacts profile view gave an error message.
* In Russian the Welcome screen was not aligned properly.
* Skype displayed Disk IO error when the data directory was in the read only folder.