Microsoft's Live One Care
by Hu Filleul
went looking for the Microsoft's Anti Spam Program which had somehow disappeared leaving a blank desktop icon. I came across something called Microsoft Live One Care which promised to provide "All-in-One Protection and Maintenance in one convenient package with its antivirus and antispyware scanners and managed, two-way firewall." It also had a feature called Tune Up which would clean up your hard drive and do a disc defragmentation. Furthermore, from the same program it would perform a drive Back-up to CDs or an external hard drive. It would also advise you as to the safety status of your system by changing the background color of its Icon between red yellow and green. Now there is a considerable package of potentially useful software! The license fee was $49.95 US per year for up to two computers. There was an offer of a 90 day free trial so after I read all the other detail I downloaded and installed it.
The first thing it asked for was permission to uninstall my Norton Anti-Virus software as I understand you should not be running two anti-virus programs at the same time. I authorized that and away it went, uninstalling Norton then installing itself. Everything seemed to be OK and it even left a Norton icon on the screen, right next to its own, which, when clicked, said to press Resume if I wanted to continue downloading. I gave that a pause.
When I activated Live One Care, the Icon came up with a red background; not good. The top choice on the menu under Protection Plus was to Scan for Viruses so I clicked and away it went, not finding any viruses. This was not surprising as Norton had been set for automatic scan and I had done a system scan a short time before. The Icon background went to yellow; some improvement. Next, I ran a scan for spyware and the program found one suspicious file which I deleted.
The Performance Plus part of the menu offered a Tune-up which I had read removed unnecessary files and did a disc defragmentation. The computer worked away for some time and I thought it took about the same amount of time as to run the same programs under XP. I noticed the menu said that it was Defender (Beta) working. Are they now charging for Beta versions of a program running old programs? The icon background remained yellow and the indication in the final Back-up and Restore section was that I needed to do a Back-up. I already use Norton's Ghost program to mirror my C:/ drive to an external drive so I checked their Help file to see if I could turn off the One Care back-up. It was fairly easy to do and as soon as I did it, the Icon background turned to green. Everything A-OK!
The second box down on the main menu suggests that you do an upgrade without waiting for the free trial period to expire. When I clicked that invitation to see what would happen, a message said that the offer was only good in the USA; a fine time to tell you. There were assurances that the rest of the world would soon have access to this great product. I wonder if they would have taken my credit card.
I thought I would try their Back-up feature to test if it would work to an external drive. I tried several times but the program could not find any of my drives. Maybe it clicked off at the 49th? I went to their Help Centre which led, eventually, to Instant Support and finally to Technical Support which assured me I was eligible for help. When I clicked on that, a message came up that said I couldn't get access and could find the reason in the "stack" in the message. The stuff in the stack was Greek to me.
Finally, I logged into their Blogs which had a section on back-up where I found there were all kinds of people with the same problem as I had. The program couldn't find any drives. I didn't check to see if it would back-up to a disc. That is easy enough to do without Live One Care.
The program had an easy-to-use interface and if it all worked, it should provide an incentive, at a reasonable cost, to take those protective measures for our computers that most of us forget to do on a regular basis. I was sold on the concept but, lucky for Norton, they have a customer renewal for at least another year.
