One Care sucks. Get it off your box.

Try going into the OneCare Firewall settings and unchecking that little box that says "Automatically change my firewall protection level when I connect to an unsecure network."

...

Paul nails it on the first try. OneCare is utter crap.

One care is not too bad for the home user, but it is not intended for the business user. There is nothing wrong with the engine, but each machine has to be configured separately. Depending on how you use your computer, there may be a lot to configure.. I bought it for my in-laws because you can cover 3 computers with one license. They are typical web surfer, email checkers and they have had no issues.

The commercial version “Microsoft Forefront” http://www.microsoft.com/forefront/default.mspx Offers the centralized management. So if your company was using that they could write a rule to allow your VPN software to work properly. Once the rule set is defined, everything should work seamlessly. This exercise has to be done with any of the major AV vendors out there.

I'd beg to differ with you Dave P, I'd say One Care is faulty at its very core... just look at its rating on AV comparatives (http://www.av-comparatives.org/seiten/ergebnisse_2007_02.php) . Oh wait, thats right... it failed so poorly as an AV it didn't qualify for a rating, twice. Go to virus bulletin for even more proof, it is quite simply the bottom of the barrel.

While your right, MS does offer to put it cheaply on 3 comps in the same house... I don't think spreading it around makes it any less crappy as an AV solution. It's just a mediocre attempt by MS to get more cash from less informed people who would likely use other equally mediocre MS products (look at frontpage, virtual pc) simply because they don't know better.

If you want to offer your parents an easy, free solution try AVG or Avast. Both are quality products and offer better paid versions. I can honestly say that when I was using AVG it was my favorite AV ever, nice simple clean UI and its not a resource hog like symantec, mcaffe and zonealarm... oh and as for a firewall, just buy them a NAT router if they don't have one. Software firewalls have become obsolete.

I use Avast! Home Edition (free) on my Vista box and it works great. (I tried AVG but I didn't like it.)

I wouldn't trust my security to *any* Microsoft product. Dump OneCare...

BTW, I've had a similar problem with my wireless network connection. From time to time, Vista decides to downgrade my connection to some kind of restricted mode for no apparent reason, which then interferes with my web access. When I reboot, the connection is fine again.

Why is it doing this??? I thought MS improved the network stack.

Just goes to show... Wait for SP1 before adopting Vista...

I have to say that once I updated my PC from Windows XP my OneCare stopped working.....since then I have taken it off and I am using another product. Why can't Microsoft get it right??????

Infinidim

Another Guy;
Some very useful information on the almost useless Onecare in your comment, thank you.
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Isn't it amazing that M$ cannot fix the viral problems in its Operating System, that M$ has caused. Instead we see the irony of paying M$ for Onecare to protect us from the problems that M$ caused in the first place. And even Onecare is a POS.

The fact that Vista broke programs like the very good free AVG is enough reason for most people to never use Vista, or to replace it with XP. When you start adding up the cost of replacing a good free product with a crappy product that dosn't even work right and lets most of the bad stuff though it, it just dosn't add up to move to Vista.

I've used OneCare for over a year and compared to the suction of resources I had from Norton and McAfee, OneCare has been excellent. I decided to use it after seeing the speed improvements on my parents PC's. I've used OneCare with a corporate VPN and with Citrix and not had issues.

As for the poor rating in some of the virus tests, some of those were a result of OneCare not detecting viruses that exploit OS versions not supported by OneCare. It may be nice for OneCare to detect a Win95 virus that targeted IE4, but I would not consider that to be Failure for a product that targets your basic desktop user (my parents).

The only annoyance I've expereinced has been debugging WinFroms apps that use the internet. As the assembly's version # incremented, a separate white listing of the program occured, so the firewall rule list was rather long and I had to clean it up on occasion.

Thank you for pointing that out Aaron, another reason you shouldn't use One Care, MS has strong commercial reasons for not supporting those previous versions of windows. Why should they? Its in their interest to sell new copies of windows, and in conjunction now also sell new copies of One Care. Now you think thats no big deal, what if in a few years they stop giving updates to the OS your running now? Their reason? Because they can... they will come up with some excuse that it cannot support new features and cut you off. MS has a conflict of interest in the matter, and I can't believe they don't exploit it.

As a comparison, look at AVG (user guide can be found here for OS support, http://free.grisoft.com/filedir/doc/AVG_Anti-Virus_Free/User_manual/avg_aff_uma_en_75_8.pdf)

AVG has an interest to support as many platforms as they can, they do support with their basic client Vista(before stupid MS patch) XP, 2k, ME, NT workstation and 98 SE, I even bet it works on 95. The reason they support them is because they want to sell many copies of their paid version. They also have an interest in keeping the free version very high quality else they risk losing their reputation for excellence and their word of mouth support (my recommendation for instance). Oh and btw, maybe you forget aaron but there are millions of users of 98 SE and other old OS, so don't count them out.

As for your defence of the poor rating, One Care scored an 78% in overall trojan detection versus free AVG with 97%. Thats just one study though, if you find AV comparatives to be biased in their test, go to ICSA labs or VB Bulletin, or any other tester (do make sure you also read their test protocol). If one care has been tested by them, I'm sure you'll find more startling numbers.

The bottom line is that MS simply has no compelling reason to make a great program, they just seemed to want to make the least effort they could while offering something mediocre to make money on.

Thats about it, do give AVG/Avast another shot Joe, I don't think poor/lacking products should be supported, it only encourages companies to continue producing them.

Another guy..., I fout OC far better. It has caught several virues that others have missed. Infinidim, just uninstalled and reinstall OC, what is the problem? I have seen Avast, Norton & McCrappy all have trouble when upgraded from XP to Vista.

JoeM;
Great point you just made that;
"I have seen Avast, Norton & McCrappy all have trouble when upgraded from XP to Vista."
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All of them broken, huh? Maybe since M$ is selling Onecare, they wanted the products of their competitors to be broken? It just another reason not to use any M$ products.

Here is a reason to use the google search engine instead of Windows Live/MSN, since we are talking about virus type programs;

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-6183818.html

MS does not innovate, like google is.

Another Guy: the juice is not worth the squeeze. Why would you invest development time into a product designed for a 10 yr old OS? If the client base is so cheap/frugal that they don't have at least XP, what is the chance they are going to purchase a desktop security app like OneCare? Who would spend $45 on software to protect the Pentium 266-700MHz PC worth $20?

McAfee and Norton have had a decade to get a product that takes care of the user and failed. Every time a new attack vector came out (spam, spyware, phishing), they bolted on another product until they started tripping over each other.

OneCare unified the management of virus definitions, firewall condition, patch management, spyware, and disk mgt to "is the one care icon green". The user experience is much better and faster.

Bravo Mr. Stonerock. I too have switched over to OneCare and don't give 2 left buttocks for morons stuck on their Commodore 64 equivalents. The MS bashers should crap or get off the pot and just switch over to Ubuntu or go have an affair with SUSE.

OneCare has been great, not a single issue and hasn't ground my system to a screeching halt while using Vista Ultimate as my PVR with dual TV tuners. My Vista Ultimate box was hobbled together with an AMD Athlon XP 1800, 512MB ram and an old K7S5A MB. Sighmantec and McCrappy would have hosed this box long ago. OneCare happily does it's business and doesn't stutter my machine.

chips b malroy, if that was true then OC should not have broken either.

Hi Joe - I share your pain - albeit in a different spot - I've been trying to read up on problems associated with One Care ever since my Virus protection in the product apparently switched itself off for no apparent reason. I'm running Vista Ultimate and up to a couple of days ago, OneCare was pain free protection. I emailed the tech support people here in the Uk and got back an overly complciated series of "to try" cheat sheets that were hard to decipher let alone implement. I ended up re-installing and still find the virus protection is disabled. Attempts to switch it on bring up messages saying that "virus and spyware settings cannot be changed at this time". On a separate laptop running XP pro - I can't update the virus definitions. I'm hearing from other sites that there is a problem with their servers? No mention of this when I ended up calling their tech support desk (and paid for the call). The guy admitted they had received a lot of calls about the product ... oh dear - wish I'd gone for Norton 360 - anyone else in the same boat?

By the way ToadTheWetsprocket - I have no axe to grind with MS - I generally have no problems with their products or their services. However, having NO virus protection is an issue worth getting stemed up over. And if a MS business security manager is correctly reported as having said what he said here - then maybe we have reason to be concerned?

Has anyone tried un_installing Windows Live OneCare after the subscription has expired? When the subscription expires, you are unable to turn on the firewall. I removed the program and am now able to turn on the Windows firewall, but both CD drives are now diabled. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE is modified when restarting after removing the software.

Hello,
I am very glad to know I am not the only one with One Care. It was ok for about 2 days, this afternoon I came back to use the computer and I was stuck. I could not go anywhere (internet), even the start page. I am told there if no firewall protection, but I can not turn it on.
It says to restart, I did, same thing. All of the sudden all kinds of programs flashed on the screen almost all at once. I am ready to ditch One Care, and stick with what I have. I did not know this program took control like it has.
Thanks for your insights people.
Kim

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I Don't know how good it is yet, but i can say i am already worried, its been installed for 1 1/2 mnth and it never finds any malitous software, never finds nothing, not sure if its actually working, it updates. It wont let me us adware anymore which finds stuff all the time. Worried its not working, the free stuff MS had a year and half ago to remove malitous software was great for awhile, this doesn't show me nothing yet.