Windows Live OneCare (beta)
I installed Windows Live OneCare on my primary Vista laptop on Friday. I’m looking for some good Vista antivirus and the Symantec product (also beta) didn’t impress me. Given that I’ve only used it for one day, here are my first impressions.
- It tells me it can’t finish installing because it needs to connect to the internet which, apparently, it is unable to do. This means it sits in my notification area and reminds me that I’m “at risk” at all times.
- It contains a firewall of its own. I’m not sure that it’s any better than the perfectly serviceable firewall that’s already in Vista. Perhaps it has advantages I don’t know about. It does mean that I now have (count ‘em) three interfaces for modifying firewall settings.
- It schedules a “tune up” every so often where it cleans up temp files, defrags your drive (which is also built into Vista already). Unfortunately, it’s not smart enough to detect when you’re using your PC and defer the task. Instead it pops up a dialog and interrupts you.
- It disabled outgoing VPN connections which required a modification to the firewall settings. Heaven help a non-technical user.
- Since I installed it, I can no longer see my connected VPNs via the network icon in the task bar notification area. I must now open the “Connect To” dialog to see what I’m connected to.
- The service executable has occasionally gone to 100% CPU utilization and caused my machine to become temporarily non-responsive. This is the first app to do this since I installed Vista in early December.
Overall, I’m not terribly impressed. In general, I must say that the Windows Live suite of products are not that impressive. I won’t even get started on the pain of recent Live Messenger releases (which nearly everyone in my office has uninstalled after Messenger had been default for years).
That said, this post was written with Windows Live Writer. It ain’t half bad.
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