In which we bravely try a new AV service…

Posted on February 9, 2006 One Comment

As noted the other day, the folks at Microsoft reminded me that I’m a beta tester for Windows OneCare Live (pretty sure you can be a beta tester too). Well heck, I had forgotten all about that for the past few months. Since I’m currently experimenting with the IE7 beta2 browser, I figured that to show just how fearless I can be, I’d uninstall my existing AV and give this a go. Truly, I’m just that fearless. Remember, I do these things so you don’t have to… (line stolen from Jerry Pournelle).

Perhaps I was a bit confused, but I also uninstalled Microsoft AntiSpyware. For some odd reason, I thought Spyware/malware mitigation was part of the OneCare product. Turns it isn’t — yet. Oops. Anyways… the installation was painless and managed all via browser and some active/x controls (oh yeah, don’t bother doing much at the site with a non-IE browser). I did have to do a reboot when it was done, but that’s not all that unusual for AV software it seems.

Now I have this pretty little green “jeweled 1″ icon down there in the tray. What’s it do? I dunno for sure, but seems to do all the typical AV’ish type stuff. In other words, grouse at me from time to time and attempt to protect me from my own experiments^h^h^h^h err… yeah, it keeps me safe.

What’s it do well? Seems to scan quite quickly compared to some of the other AV programs I’ve had on this machine (McAfee, AVG Pro and most recently, Avast (search for any of those here for more info)). And it seems to be more aggressive too. I have a drive just full of old “stuff” that I rarely use, but would hate to lose. Lots of … um… “tools”… from days gone by. The other AV programs would point them out, but leave ‘em alone. Not OneCare — it went medieval all over ‘em, quarantining most and blocking one. I guess that’s a good sign. Oh, and scanning speed seems to be fast, but as usual I forgot to benchmark the previous tools, so I can’t quantify that statement. It sure tore through that old 15GB drive though.

The built-in firewall seems to do the expected job, but so far I’m not exactly sure how different it is from the default XP firewall. That being said, it seems to notice when stuff on the inside is calling out though, so that’s a pretty good sign I think.

What’s not so great? I don’t see a provision to schedule weekly scans. For that matter, I have no clue how often it updates as that doesn’t seem to be configurable either. Probably not a huge deal, but it distresses my anal-retentive nature. Oh, and I have to do some more testing to see if this is even a problem, but I noticed that while I can tell it to exclude scanning by file, I don’t appear to be able to exclude by directory. My old VSS issue might rear its stupid little head again. Guess I’ll find out tomorrow when I settle down to bust out some code.

In general, it seems to be aimed at kind of a “install it and forget it” mentality. And for an antivirus product, I’d wager that’s not a bad deal. As a power-user, however (ok, self-proclaimed) I’d like to see more configurable options.

What haven’t I tried yet? Backup and Tune-up. oops. I mean, “Backup and Restore” and “Performance Plus”. These are part of the product (along with the AV and Firewall and the future “defender”) but I’ve yet to really give ‘em a go. Stay tuned, I suppose…

Tags: antivirus, Live, microsoft, onecare