Way to go OneCare!!!

Yeah, it looks a little fuzzy because I tried to eliminate the white background. I am not that good at graphic/photo editing

I once knew a guy that had his wife's name tattooed on his bicep but after they broke up he had a guy turn it into a bulldog, lol.

 

With NIS2008 it's for 3 PCs. Is OC the same or have to buy copy for each system?

 

WLOC's subscription covers up to 3 computers.

One thing I forgot to mention is that 2.0 has right click scan. I don't think it was present in 1.x if I remember right.

 

Tks think I will give it a try.

 

YW

I believe that you first have to install it on whichever PC you intend to be the "hub" and when you install OC on the other machines you add them to your "Circle" in your Windows Live account. I only have a single PC so I haven't actually done it, just going from what I read.

 

When installing it requires to uninstall Live Update from my Norton Save & Restore. Not sure about that part. Maybe I should just go to NIS2008 after all.

 

Oh, I saw something similar posted in the OneCare forum where someone was complaining about OC wanting to remove LiveUpdate that his Ghost used. A MVP moderator said that this was a mistake (apparently someone who worked on OC thought that LiveUpdate was for AV/IS only). He said that this problem is being worked on but didn't give a time frame.

 

Here is the response from the MVP:

Source

 

On a similar token (and I mentioned it earlier in the thread), it recognized .db files as being system files for backups -- Meaning your encrypted username / password information stored in Firefox doesn't get backed up within OneCare.

 

For the time being, OneCare still needs a lot of improvement to reach
the performance of the top AV vendors!
I tried OneCare, but it proved to be an inadequate product compared with
the long-lasting values of the AV software industry (i.e. Avira,GDATA,Kaspersky,ESET etc.)
Therefore, I uninstalled it.

Without having the experience-expertise of the traditional AV vendors,
Microsoft still has a way to cover. How long is going this way to be?
By hiring (not to say stealing) AV experts from the traditional AV companies,
Micro$oft can(?) be a serious AV competitor within a few years.
We'll see...

 

I actually don't think it will take that long. They have the money, marketing, and now the resources to continue the improvements they started. Look at the massive jump they made since the beginning of the year. Are they top tier? No, but they are in the middle of the pack now. Will it be just as easy to jump to the top tier? Absolutely not, but I don't think it will take them several years to do so.

 

If they keep up improving detection and keep the lightness it now has it will become a formidable AV. But they need to do a major overhaul on Backup for sure. I don't feel I have to jump through hoops just to do a backup to a 2nd internal drive. Plus you do not have a choice of what to back up and this has caused some concern over in the OneCare forum. And the file types it chooses to backup are questionable as Hangetsu pointed out.

Someone here had reminded me of Vista's backup capabilities (thanks, you know who you are ) which does the same thing and gives you the choice of backing up docs, photos, etc to a 2nd internal drive (Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate users also get the choice of backing up the whole system as well). I had been doing this manually but now have set up to have done automatically. I am thinking of doing a system backup but I will have to clean out the Backup drive before I can do that (put a lot of old stuff on DVDs).

Anyway, my curiosity over OC is over and I am back with Norton

A screenshot of Vista's Backup:

 

hello midway,
i forgot about the vista file backup as well.
im gonna use it to backup the files on my data partition once a day to my second hard drive.
or at least my documents.

 

Hi lodore

I didn't know you were running Vista. Last I remember you was going to put it on a new computer you were getting in either Jan. or Feb. Which version did you get?

I think it backs up everything in your /USERS/[Your Name] directory. Here is the file selection screen in Backup:

 

I have to say that onecare has improved quite a bit and found it one of the lightest along with NOD32 2.7. Now i can use my perpetual beta license i got while testing onecare. It is running very light, but i don't like it when it pops out question about firefox trying to access the internet(only first time)


Talking about the support, .....
Onecare support was excellent when it started out. Infact, they used microsoft online meeting software by which they took the control of my PC remotely to figure out the problem. I was impressed then but now i cannot say the same.

 

It didn't ask for permission for Firefox to access the net for me. All it asked for was the yENC decoder I use.

It IS very light, reminded me of NOD32 2.7 as well and it is a suite on top of that with more RAM usage. Going back to NIS has hammered that home. With WLOC I got faster bootups and shutdowns and my webpages didn't hang anymore that I had blamed on satellite latency (The Performance tool in Vista reported that a process from NIS slowed bootup and a Antibot process slowed shutdown).

I am going to have to make a hard decision...

 

Mitch,

I didn't test out OneCare as extensively as you did but my decision was to buy a Norton license for a year and reevaluate Microsoft's alternative near the end of that period. It is completely usable right now and in the long run may end up being faster, better, lighter than NIS. But today I get a more stable and quieter feel from Norton and even on my memory-poor Vista desktop NIS 2008 runs OK (with the exception of LiveUpdate being a hog and the slight web-site-loading latency you noticed). On my laptop with gobs of memory NIS+Antibot just hums along very unobtrusively.

For my part, the bottom line is that OneCare 2.0 is acceptable if I didn't already have Norton and I expect 2.1 (or whatever) to be the suite of choice a few months down the line...

 

Backup is definitely the weak point. If you go over to their forums, that's the one with the greatest activity / complaints (possibly tied with subscription activiation, believe it or not).

Its pretty sad that the Vista backup that comes with the OS is more powerful than the one that comes in OneCare; I understand their reasoning (to make backups easy for people who don't know about backups), but their reasoning was flawed.

 

As you can tell I have made my decision

Hangetsu, I read all of that on OneCare’s forum about Backup. I didn’t try the 1.x Backup out (or don’t remember doing so) but people were complaining that in that version they had the option to include other files and folders that they choose but this disappeared in 2.0 (in Vista you do not have that option either but at least it gives me the 2nd hard drive option). In your case you could include those Firefox .db files you mentioned into the backup. Rightfully so, these people complained that the OneCare team had went backwards in 2.0 as far as Backup was concerned. They could have two options—a Basic one like they are using now and an Advanced mode for people who wants more items backed up and then everyone would be happy. If they added the Advanced option it would be better than what is included with Vista thus it would be worth it. I will keep OC’s Backup off and use Vista’s for the time being. But since I only paid $19.95 for it anyway it is not too much of a concern right now. With all the complaints going on over on the OC board they are going to have to do something or lose subscriptions.

Speaking of subscriptions at least I didn’t have an issue with it. I was able to resubscribe with no problem.

Brent, I wonder if more RAM would have alleviated the latency problem in loading web pages. It has been stated that Vista works best with the min. of 2GB but I haven’t ran into any issues with 1.5. My next hardware upgrade will be another computer (probably next summer) so I am not investing anymore into this one. The other night I did the “crack site” tests on WLOC. I visited different ones but never saw a warning if a site was trying to install something (IE7 PM would have probably alerted me first before OC anyway) but it did find some nasties in some keygens I downloaded. Afterwards I ran SAS and Prevx CSI (and later with Norton) and everything is still clean. The firewall seems to recognize common programs and windows services so I don’t see too many “allow/deny” popups (it did not recognize Prevx CSI though).

I still can’t get over the lightness of WLOC. What gets me is that I have read some posts on another forum complaining it was bloatware. I guess it would be if you run it on an 8088 machine, lol.

 

I think some people just assume if it has a dozen different modules (startup optimization, network "circle", etc.) then it must be slower and heavier on your system than a suite that doesn't offer all those features. While I suppose there's some correlation, you never know until you test it out throughly. Some people don't need to waste their time testing when they already know the answer (esp. when it comes to Norton and Microsoft products).

 

-- With all the respect, I don't think that Micro$oft can be
Kaspersky, AVIRA, GDATA, ESET etc. within 12 or 18 months!
Jumping to the middle-level performance was easy for them but going to the top
will not be that easy! In the meanwhile, the traditional top AV performers will
not passively sit and wait for the expansion of Micro$oft.
-- O.K. OneCare is a improvement, but let's not get so excited...
-- In the minds of many -not to say most- users, Micro$oft has not exactly been
the symbol of PC Security.
-- Even if OneCare becomes a top AV software, many people STILL
will not find very appealing the idea of assigning their PC Security to Micro$oft.
Not after what we have been all these years: Since the era of Windows 3.11,
Microsoft has caused us nothing but Security troubles.
Of course, there will always be the loyal supporters of Micro$oft.
I remember some of them celebrating about the 'notorious' Micro$oft Defender.
The same happens with OneCare...

 

OneCare can be improved, but it remains a scanner with an incomplete blacklist and that will never change. The only possible improvement is a less incomplete blacklist and the bad guys will never stop to create new ones until the signature database of OneCare explodes or the user gets tired of the constant increasing scan time of OneCare.
Meanwhile I keep my whitelist Anti-Change Scanner with a detection rate of VB100% and a steady scan time of less than 2 minuts.

 

Even if i liked MS, personally i would never buy this. Sure i expect it to be leader, but only when it's free.
Like millions out there, i would wait with Avast!/Antivir until they offer it for download to customers. Then i'd decide if even so i would want it. Probably not.

 

Heck, the same happens with the OS itself -- That's why there are people running Linux

Personally, as long as the AV is adequate, I'm more concerned about integration with the OS and performance. OneCare gives me better performance on an older machine running Vista than my NOD32 box - Never thought I'd see that. Is it a better AV? I don't think so (not yet), but it works well enough. And I don't see anyone integrating better with a Microsoft product than Microsoft. KIS, as good as it is, has its ObjectIDs issue. NOD32 (before v3), as good as it is, would throw odd messages if you didn't run as administrator.

I don't blindly follow Microsoft, but at the same time I don't immediately dismiss them, either.

 

Dear Hangetsu,
Running Vista on an older PC is not advisable.
It is like loading a BIG Rock on a small truck.
If Security had been your 1st Priority, you would have kept your WinXP
and used a more effective product than OneCare in your old PC.
However, you preferred to lower your Security for the sake of the integration with Vista.
To be fair, you are not the only one who did it!
In fact, some Vista-lovers moved even further:
Brain-washed by the advertising campaign of Micro$oft,
they believed that Vista is such an exceptional OS that requires little or no Security at all.
You wouldn't like to see what kind of Malware we have found in their PCs...