Solo Technology

Last night I wrote a bit about the beta OneCare service from our friends at microsoft. Not much has changed since then as I’ve really only been using it for a day, but I did get some answers to my questions, so figured I’d share.

One of my issues was that I didn’t see a way to schedule AV scans. So, just for grins, I sent an email to the support server and asked about it quite late last night. Had a nice — and fast — response waiting for me this morning around 5:30 when I stumbled into the home office. Turns out that the Tune-up service (err, Performance Plus), that I hadn’t really explored, has the solution.

The tune-up thingy, essentially, is scheduled (by default) to run every 4 weeks. I’ve changed it to weekly because, well, that seems more rational to me. It does a bunch of stuff, but the key is that one of the “stuffs it does” is an AV scan. Other stuffs it does are related to defragging and backing up. Oh, and you can tell it to clean up old files too. Problem solved on the AV front.

Still figuring out the defrag and backup things. Backup is interesting as it wants to either go to an external drive or CD/DVD drive. I plugged in a 60GB USB2 drive to experiment with this.

Backup hits the usual stuff — my documents, desktop files, Outlook/Outlook Express email, Pictures, financial programs, etc. And then you can add additional directories (or files) to have it monitor. First run is brutal and, as expected, takes quite a while (3 hours in my case). Subsequent runs appear to be a “mirror” type deal — it only updates the changed files.

As far as defrag goes, jury is still out. If a disk is heavily fragmented, it’ll defrag it over several sessions. That seems odd… No UI to speak of so hard to figure out what’s going on. I’ll get it to finish up then check out the results with other tools. Eventually. That’s certainly not the main reason I’m running OneCare, so I can be pretty casual about it.

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