Want to get a brand new Live ID and start fresh with Microsoft? Here’s how you can transfer your account.

Change Live ID

Microsoft Live ID (soon to be renamed «Microsoft Account») is the key to everything from Redmond these days. Whether it’s Xbox 360, SkyDrive, Live Mail, Zune Pass, an App Hub account, Messenger, or Windows Phone, your Live ID is the heart.

The question is what if you want to change your Live ID?

Here we don’t mean switching only to the phone, which unfortunately requires a hard reboot (and no, sorry). Instead we are talking about what if you have an old Hotmail.com email account and want a new Live.com account? Perhaps you’re unhappy with your current username, or we like it, you’ve been using your Hotmail account since 2002 as a glorified spam experiment.

We’ll walk you through the process of getting a new Live ID and make sure all your other services are backpropagated to reflect the changes, keeping all your services intact.

Read on after the break for our guide…

Why change?

For starters, some of you may be wondering why you would want to change your Live ID in the first place. We will explain the reason to you.

We’ve had a Hotmail account since 2002, which predates even Google’s Gmail (introduced in 2004). At one time, Hotmail.com was great for signing up to sites, buying things, etc., but not for your «real» email. Instead, we had our own ISP email accounts, and our Hotmail quickly became our «junk mail» account, which we toss out if you like.

This was a good thing for many years, as Hotmail was pretty weak during much of the 2000s when Gmail caught on. Then a funny thing happened: Windows Phone 7. Suddenly, your Hotmail account became your Live ID account and became the key to use your Windows Phone 7 device. We still didn’t use Hotmail, so we ignored it. And it got more spam.

Now, in 2012, between SkyDrive, Live Mail, Windows Phone Marketplace, App Hub, Messenger, and our growing dislike of all things Google, we’ve decided to ditch Gmail.

This and Hotmail/Live Mail became good. How very good . So we wanted to go back to the Microsoft cloud.

But our Hotmail account was lame She was hacked . It was full of spam, had an outdated Hotmail.com address, and frankly, we just don’t like our username. Our second problem is that Hotmail users can’t change their Live ID in settings (don’t think we haven’t tried).

So we want a new Live ID. We want to start from scratch (not just change our email address).

But what happens to our Xbox 360 account? How about our $15 a month Zune Pass (with free 10 song credit)? Our App Hub account? And those apps… of course you bought the Windows Phone apps, but we spent over $600. Of course, we’re not going to start over and lose it all, are we?

This is our reason and our concern. You can have yours. Whatever it is, let’s move on to getting that switch.