I thought that OneCare might be a decent all in one bit of security software. I was wrong.

On my desktop Vista PC it works OK most of the time. Hmm.. good point, how do I know it’s actually doing anything, maybe I’ve been lucky and just haven’t been anywhere near any security problems. Anyway the OneCare icon in the tray stays green most of the time which means it’s happy with itself.

Well it was till yesterday when it was suddenly red and displayed me a message that it’s virus definitions were out of date. I thought it was responsible for updating its own virus definitions. Also, when I double clicked on the icon to see why it was red it seemed that it had turned off its own Windows Defender.

On my other two PC’s, which also have OneCare installed, both of their icons are permanently red and when I check on those it says that it hasn’t been able to install some of its own updates.

One of the PC’s is running Vista and the other XP. No doubt an operating system function is getting in the way and stopping the install. Consistent on both operating systems. The message does say to contact the vendor. Pity it didn’t display a Microsoft help-desk phone number.

Quote of the day

‘Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel’ Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

I heard this morning on Leo Laporte’s Windows Weekly podcast that there are issues with Windows One Care.

An attempt by Microsoft to provide some kind of security software that I have paid for. More fool me. Currently on my Vista PC when it’s started One Care pops up and tells me it has amended my security settings as I am no longer connected to a network. This is the peer-to-peer network that I tried to get Vista to connect to and which resolutely fails. Obviously Vista thinks it was connected to the network or maybe even has nearly connected to the network. If the Vista pc hasn’t been turned on for a couple of weeks then One Care worryingly has reduced its perceived security level, to orange from green, as it finds that the virus checking files are a bit old and possibly out of date. So you get a nag window for that.

On my laptop which is also running Vista and doesn’t get switched on from one week to the next. One Care, on start up, usually loses its own spyware software telling me that I have no spyware software running despite One Care supposedly being just that. It’s all a bit wobbly.

What’s worrying is that when I paid for it online the only option was to use a credit card. How do I cancel that. Am I to be automatically debited for it for ever? Maybe there’s a Microsoft phone number I can use to cancell it. Yeah, like hell.

Quote of the day

‘The very first law in advertising is to avoid the concrete promise and cultivate the delightfully vague’ Bill Cosby (1937-)