Skip to navigation

PCPro-Computing in the Real World Printed from www.pcpro.co.uk

Register to receive our regular email newsletter at http://www.pcpro.co.uk/registration.

The newsletter contains links to our latest PC news, product reviews, features and how-to guides, plus special offers and competitions.

Windows Live OneCare

Verdict

A big improvement from Microsoft, but there's still some way to go.

Review Date: 6 Dec 2007

Price when reviewed: per year for 3 PCs

Overall Rating
4 stars out of 6

Last time we looked at OneCare, it was a huge let-down, delivering a dreadful user experience and minimal protection (see web ID: 120456). While OneCare still has some way to go, it's heading in the right direction, as shown by its score of 88% in our malware-detection test. Admittedly, this was this month's second-worst performance, but at just 4% behind the group average it's high enough overall for OneCare to now call itself a serious contender.

It's a shame that email-borne threats aren't inspected as they arrive. This neglect of email also extends to spam, which is left to Windows Mail's standard junk filter. There's no frontline protection against phishing emails, either.

Thankfully, when we actually visited some bad websites, OneCare leapt to life, stopping 86% of attempted malevolent downloads. Its firewall capabilities were impressive, too, making the test PC wholly invisible to our scanners and impervious to attack.

Although this improved detection comes with an attractively low impact on system resources, OneCare still manages to make itself inconvenient when malware is found. While all other packages manage to neutralise threats in a matter of seconds, OneCare habitually takes a minute or more to clean up an infected file as you try to download it (locking the browser window while it does so, so you can't even continue surfing while it works). Worse, it then often demands that you restart the whole machine to complete the process. Although OneCare is better than it was, it needs to grow out of nonsense such as this before we can recommend it.

Author: Darien Graham-Smith

Be the first to comment this article

You need to Login or Register to comment.

(optional)

advertisement

Most Commented Reviews
Latest News Stories Subscribe to our RSS Feeds
Latest Blog Posts Subscribe to our RSS Feeds
Latest Features
Latest Real World Computing

advertisement

Sponsored Links
 
SEARCH
SIGN UP

Your email:

Your password:

remember me

advertisement


Hitwise Top 10 Website 2008