Review: Windows Live OneCare
Sunday June 4, 2006
To maintain and protect your home computer you need to use a variety of tools and tasks. You need to apply patches and updates, backup critical data, defragment and clean your hard drive, install and maintain antivirus and anti-spyware protection, use a firewall, etc. That is a lot of stuff for someone who is not a computer guru, never mind a security expert, to try and install and maintain. Wouldn't it be great if you could get someone else to take care of all of that like the I.T. department at work takes care of your work PC? Welcome to Windows Live OneCare. Microsoft has just introduced this new product which takes a holistic approach to PC maintenance and security and provides a comprehensive, automatic system for protecting your computer. Does it fulfill its promise? Check out my review of Windows Live OneCare to find out more.
Comments
Although I tend to lean towards individual products, (spybot for spyware, zonealarm for firewall, etc.) M$ is correct in employing the “holistic” approach…like most everyone else, my “firewall” zonealarm, now does 4 or 5 “other” things as is the case w/ my symantec “anti-virus”. And, alas, M$ has that competition throat-cutter “auto-update” function which will give OneCare a leg up; but, I’m so used to M$ offering crippled versions of other’s software…I have reservations about trusting them w/ my security. Case in point: that unfathomable Win Defender…how many times have i watched it give me a clean bill of health only to have adware or spybot rack up 3 or 4 malware probs 5 minutes later? And, the firewall?….hope to shout its significantly advanced over that in XPsp2….can it compete with ZoneAlarm? I don’t know, I’ll just sit here with my “independents” and see how these holistic packages turn out.
MS OneCare can suck eggs.I had it from day one as a tester.It is completely wrong and such an awful case of ARROGANCE when a company,especially MS,can come along and DICTATE to you what you will and won’t have on your computer.Got rid of OneCare pronto once MS demanded I delete my Avast and ZoneAlarm both or OneCare would cease to work.OneCare is also extremely WASTEFUL when doing backups.One back up may only have 50 to 80 mgs of data in it,yet they refuse to add to a CD-R or even a CD-RW,new disc everytime,nuts,who’s paying for all these disc’s,me or Microsoft??.Don’t buy it,don’t take it,even for free.Glad it’s gone.Thx
Fantastic product. Don’t have to worry about firewalls, anti-this, anti-that, just one product that works in the background. Works perfectly!
I’ve tried 3 installs of onecare and have not got a backup working yet. even if it did actually work, I would want to select what gets backed up.
On one install, backup gives an error message but doesn’t tell you what the error is. Other times it locked up and gave me the ‘not responding’ error several times.
But I do like the antivirus.