Dogfooding: Windows Live OneCare 2.0 beta

One of the 'perks' at Microsoft is the ability to dogfood things - i.e. installing every piece of alpha, beta, gamma and whatnot version of software that interests you. And then observing if your laptop still boots, or not.

I was asked recently "What's a good antivirus/antispyware software for a small company?". My obvious answer, which came out in 2 seconds, was of course "Forefront products!", but remembering this company had mostly laptops, I chose to recommend/insinuate that Windows Live OneCare 2.0 (https://get.live.com/) might be worth looking at. I've had the habit of skipping most of Microsoft's consumer products because I don't have the need for them personally.

Installation of OneCare 2.0 beta is fairly straightforward - setup -> next -> next -> restart. Since I already had another antivirus on my laptop I disabled that before restarting - just to avoid any additional problems.

After reboot OneCare shows a panel with a risk-factor of "good". Great!

Next, one needs to set up subscription - pay something to get updates. Long story short, I'm not only $49,95 poorer but my subscription doesn't work. It's good that the billing process works, yet I didn't receive the key to actually activate my subscription.

Bypassing this slight annoyance, next I need to connect my OneCare to other PC's in my circle. Obviously since I'm running a beta software I don't need to connect this anywhere - and I couldn't find a way to disable the nagging about connecting this machine URGENTLY to my OneCare circle. No thanks.

Finally, I've got the third urgent (!) message of backing up my PC. Since my subscription is not valid (yet, anyway) I can't use online backup. I do however have a 2 GB memory stick (with a fancy Vista-sticker, which makes it faster) that I tried to use as a backup media. After carefully selecting which files to backup, I get "Unknown error" when trying to schedule or initiate the backup.

I do have protection now, but with 3 red warnings throughout the OneCare console, and "YOU ARE AT RISK" everywhere. I guess I'm still not ready for consumer products.

Comments

• Anonymous
  August 30, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  August 30, 2007
  To add to my previous post, I have also done some beta testing with various Symantec products, but I had much better luck with those, even while running beta releases of Vista.

• Anonymous
  August 30, 2007
  Thanks for the input. Since OneCare 2.0 is still in beta, it's hard to make a proper judgment on it. Based on my quick testing it definitely needs more user-friendliness and less clutter.   McAfee is something I should get to know again. I gave up on the whole company after their version of antivirus for SharePoint Portal Server 2003 (SPS) just refused to do anything, and McAfee's support told me they didn't have a single echnical support engineer for the product (how I miss the old F-Prot times, when AV was just AV, and nothing else ;).

• Anonymous
  August 30, 2007
  I had to deal with their support a little bit recently, and it was not exactly a good experience...  I bought one of the new Inspiron 1520s, and I did a clean install to remove some of dell's partitions and set up one for Ubuntu.  It only came with 30 day trial disks, and I guess I had to register the installed software before using those disks, which I didn't do.  They didn't give me a key or anything, so I had to use their chat about 3 times, call once, fax my invoice from dell, and then contact through chat again because I don't think they processed it.  It does work now though, and it seem to not be too bad.

• Anonymous
  August 30, 2007
  The alert about connecting to a circle is a glitch that has just appeared in the past few days - speculations is that OneCare is not able to connect to Live ID to process the circle information (actually all of your problems may be related to that).  There's been no word as of yet from OneCare on the issue, but it's all over the OneCare forums.  Up until (maybe) last Sunday this problem wouldn't have occurred, and it's not occurring in the non 2.0 versions of OneCare (they don't provide the circle functionality). When it does work, it's kinda cool.  Especially allowing printer sharing (with no user setup at all, you just install OneCare and it shares your printers if you want it to).  Much nicer than trying to share a printer via the OS.

• Anonymous
  August 30, 2007
  Does it take up a lot of resources?  I think that was something I noticed when using 1.0.

• Anonymous
  August 30, 2007
  The comment has been removed