Windows Live OneCare
As you may (or may not) know, I was involved on the Beta testing of Windows Live OneCare which has now been released live to the public (HMV were stocking it for approx £40 at the weekend).
What is the point of OneCare?
As one of the latest releases from Microsoft, OneCare has been built to check and remove viruses, clean up the hard drive, and improve the performance of the PC on which it resides.
OneCare, like most other anti-virus products don’t sit well together on the same machine, so if you want OneCare to become your central port of call for all things AV and performance driven, then you’re going to have to uninstall anything else that is potentially going to conflict/compete with it. It does sit side by side with Windows Defender.
Aimed at both indivdual home users and small business, OneCare offers three computer licenses per subscription (no limit to the number of subscriptions you purchase). Sign up is assigned to your Windows Live ID. Although it isn’t a server-based product, SBS does support it - or rather SBS doesn’t grumble about it.
OneCare comes from the Microsoft Live family suite and works on both Windows XP and Vista OS’. If you have been running the Beta version you can claim approx. 60% off the retail price of first year’s service if you purchase your copy before February 12th 2007.
So what do I think of it so far?
Well, I know I’m not alone saying that Vista has added a few complications to many of my desktop applications. One of the things with OneCare is that it 
sits happily as a green logo in the System Tray until something rocks the boat and then it goes red…
We all know red is bad and that a reboot is usually imminent if a fix is applied. This is not useful when you have three or four applications open mid-flow at work. I can’t ignore it either because red means danger and as OneCare is the only application protecting my system now I’m going to have to pay attention.
And if it isn’t going red, it’s more often than not amber because I am fiddling around with Vista and I keep changing the settings. OneCare sits there tutting at me before it lays down the orange reminder and sits back with a smug grin.
I don’t want to be ‘fair’! Fair is what call the weather in the UK when you can’t think of something to say about it. It’s the word that my teacher’s used on my report card for my success in Mathematics! ‘Fair’ is not even ‘average’ as far as I’m concerned and my system isn’t going to be a run-of-the-mill system! In all seriousness, ‘fair’ isn’t good enough when it comes to PC security.
On tonight’s ‘fair’ report, it wanted to tell me that I needed to back up my laptop because I’d made a few system changes that needed saving.
I like OneCare for this, it keeps an eye on my system for me, uses simple colour coding and keeps the choices to a minimum i.e. “back up or don’t back up but if you don’t then I’ve told you and it’ll be your fault if things go wrong”.
OneCare is begging to tell you “I told you so” and that it’s for “your own good”. Hopefully, end-users will get the blatent signalling that they are going to have to look after their machine before it bites them on the rear and allow us to say “I told you so”…
Being completely honest, with OneCare installed on both my home and laptop PC, I have been more attentive to my backup procedures and have been impressed with how relatively painless it has been.
You’ll need to be a little bit forgiving with it at first as it blocks most things including xBox but it’s very easy to change the settings and you have the option to open and block ports.
Questions?
I know that David made a presentation once that showed that even the best three AV programmes combined didn’t detect 100% of known viruses so why should I just rely on OneCare to do the job of a combination?
Where is OneCare going to go now? Is it going to be given away free with new machines and is there going to be a version available in an SBS branded form? *Update* I have had to uninstall it from my business machine because it conflicts with our Symantec AV programme supported on our SBS Network.
If OneCare can sit on SBS supported networks then what about those servers installed with network AV programs? Conflicts like that won’t be appreciated and I know OneCare doesn’t like being de-activated (you can’t turn it off unless you uninstall it).
More information:
Windows Live OneCare Site (inc. free trial)
Windows Live OneCare Team Blog
*Update*