Solo Technology

I’ve spent the evening uninstalling Windows Live OneCare from three of our home machines. I bought it on a whim last year when I was able to get an introductory offer — 3 machines for $19. Renewal time is coming up but now at the real price of $49. Still not a bad price for covering three machines, but I’m opting to pass and go back to free solutions.

Since I assume AVG Free probably still has the dire warnings if you have more than one copy on the network, and it happens to be installed on a 4th machine, I’m going with Avast Free Home edition as the replacement. I’ve had decent luck with it in the past and the clincher was when it turned up some bogies on the initial scan after installation on one of our machines.

[Update: Thanks to Karel, I realize I assumed incorrectly about the AVG issue. That no longer happens. ]

Just for grins, I’m also loading Defender back onto these machines. It was part of OneCare and seemed to provide some value so I’ll keep it around.

Unscientifically, with OneCare uninstalled and Avast/Defender installed, my home desktop seems to boot up (to a useable state) about a minute faster…. Granted, I didn’t measure that before the uninstall, so I can’t quantify it.

I was going to go with ClamWin on my machine, but since the kids and their friends use it from time to time, I chickened out. I want a real-time scanner. Am I being over cautious? Their accounts aren’t admin accounts, after all.

I now have to rethink my backup strategy a bit as I was using some of the convenient built-in features of OneCare to manage backups across the 3 machines to one external USB drive. (see “Scattered Home Backups” for info on what I was up to). Now I’ll probably get the Mozy client on more machines as I have some extra unused space. I’ll also go with my SyncToy scheduling to do some cross-machine mirroring as well. I use that to cover music and photo libraries that don’t really need “generational” backups. It also saves me some space on Mozy…

I was actually planning to build a Windows Home Server to manage file sharing and backups, but I’m just not ready. I have some old hardware that would work, but I want to do it on something a bit more modern, low-power and cooler running. I don’t need another space-heater in the house and I sure don’t need another hit to the electric bill! In fact, we started shutting off machines at night and the electric bill dropped noticeably.

4 Responses to “Antivirus And Backup Changes”

1. Alisha on January 29th, 2008 9:06 pm
   

   Does Defender work well for you? I ask because I’ve heard mixed reviews.

   For a reason I have now forgotten, I actually had it disabled. I can’t remember why, so I enabled it again.

2. Bob on January 30th, 2008 4:15 am
   

   Do yourself a favor and try Idrive instead of Mozy. I’ve had nothing but problems with Mozy Free and Mozy Pro. I just switched a couple of my machines over to Idrive (they have a 2GB free account like Mozy) and it works much more reliably. So far, I’m very impressed.

   Bob

3. Nathan on January 30th, 2008 8:20 am
   

   I find defender to be a decent anti-spyware tool. When used with good AV, and spybot, I think it is worth using. I don’t use it on older machines that don’t need another program running in the background.

   I too wish that clamwin had some active features. I find it to be fast, stable, and it uses almost no resources. Maybe some day soon.

4. Chris Kasten on January 30th, 2008 11:33 pm
   

   Alisha - the only issues I’ve ran into with Defender involved trying to install earlier versions of OneCare on machines that already had Defender installed. Things went all pear-shaped quickly.

   Otherwise, I’ve had pretty good luck with it being quietly unobtrusive but helpful on machines that that kids use.

   Bob - I might give it a look someday. Right now I’m pretty content with Mozy (my referrals have me a bit above 2GB )

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