Information & Publications
Product Review: Windows Live™ OneCare™
By Tommy Magee,
Legal Technology Consultant
This fall and early 2007, Microsoft will bring to market what promises to be one of the richest series of products in its 30-year history. These releases are based around a concept Microsoft calls “Live.” One of these new services is Windows Live OneCare, and it exemplifies the manner in which Microsoft is expanding its resources to include subscription-based services that compliment new software offerings.
The idea behind Windows Live OneCare is to provide an all-in-one PC maintenance tool coupled with an antivirus solution. Many of the tools that OneCare uses are similar to those already available as standard Windows system tools, such as Disk Cleanup, Disk Defragmenter and NTBackup. However, these individual tools can prove cumbersome for the average user. Thus, essential maintenance and security issues often are neglected, leaving the user open to an unpleasant computing experience. OneCare automates and combines these maintenance operations into single tasks. Microsoft makes wizards available to assist in configuring or customizing these jobs, which are divided into three sections: Backup and Restore, Performance Tune-up and Protection Plus.
OneCare Backup and Restore is a user-friendly and much-welcomed addition to this product. Backup and Restore uses a wizard to walk the user through the backup process, allowing the user to choose the backup destination, such as a writable CD/DVD drive or an external hard drive. Then it scans the user’s computer looking for important files and directories, such as pictures and music, documents, e-mail databases, financial files and more. The user can customize what is backed up as well as add additional items to the job. These items can be restored at later time should the need arise with a similar ease.
OneCare Performance Plus is a “one-click” solution for all of the optimization services that Windows Live OneCare provides. It is an automated tune-up process that defragments the hard drive to speed up file access, scans the computer for viruses and spyware, checks for files that need to be backed up and assures that your computer is up-to-date with Microsoft’s latest updates and patches for Windows XP or the upcoming release, Windows Vista.
OneCare Protection Plus uses “Windows Defender” as its foundation for virus and spyware Protection. Windows Defender, formerly Microsoft AntiSpyware, was in development for some time prior to OneCare’s release and has been deftly refined. It uses proven methods of protection based upon malware definition releases, auto-protection and full system scanning schemes.
This product is subscription based. A one-year subscription for Windows Live OneCare is $49.95 for up to three PCs, and additional computers can be added for a nominal fee. OneCare is just one of many new products and services that will be offered under the Microsoft Live umbrella in an attempt to move users towards the “software as a service” subscription model.
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Source: The LogicForce Letter, Fall 2006
