Had been using Windows live mail 2011 on a dell win 7 laptop for years with no problems, something happened and I ended up having to switch it from POP to IMAP.  Since then it has been buggy and not connecting very well to the server at all. (this was one of many bugs on that pc (hard drive also making noise so a good time to replace it anyway).  Bought a clean win 7 laptop with a fresh installation of Win 7 64 bit and opened windows live mail to configure it to my Microsoft "live" mail (@Hotmail) account.  Still many of the same issues as the other laptop, connects to server intermittently, almost seems like a bandwith issue as I left it one evening and it seemed to have run all night and downloaded the majority of my account (thousands of emails).  usually during the day I cant get even get it to update my inbox or send an email without delay or error message.  I have restarted laptop sometimes it updates mail othertimes it just stalls and errors out.

getting 0X800CCC0E error code sometimes, otherwise getting "your IMAP server has not responded in 120 seconds. would you like to wait" type of error.

Wondering if I can use POP settings and if there would be any benefit?  What do I do to use live email account with live mail this way?

Otherwise are there IMAP settings that would work better than what I have right now?

currently

imap-mail.outlook.com

smtp-mail.outlook.com

log on using clear text authentication

outgoing port 587

incoming 993

both have "requires a secure connection ssl" checked

Live mail program itself works great on this pc.  Would really love to fix connection problems.