Why Microsoft Windows One Care Sucks!
Hello to everyone about to buy windows One Care, Don’t! I bought Windows One Care on 23 May 2008 and I have had nothing but problems! Below is my Experience with Windows One Care.
Under a suggestion of a friend who already had Windows One Care, I decided to buy a subscription without doing the 30 day trial period, bad move on my part, but my friend said it works better than anything he has ever tried. I figured that if anyone knew about Windows Vista it would be Microsoft! Or at least that’s what I get for thinking…
I installed Windows One Care on 23 May 2008 and I during the setup, it software made me uninstall all my existing firewalls, Antivirus and Spyware software before it would complete the setup. It was either uninstall or onecare would not. So like an idiot I uninstalled everything and installed One Care!
A couple things that I liked about One Care is that I could installed on 3 computers, and it ran very light on my computer, compared to Macafee or Norton. It also did a few things like a backup files, spyware, defrag and it advertised that it would clean up the registry, that’s probably why I bought it really. After my first complete scan and backup I was setting with a little green icon on my computer’s task bar and I thought I was safe and sound with everything automated, just like it advertises.
About 3 days had passed, and I was working on a project for work, and a One Care Popup appeared stating that it updated and needed to restart my computer. So I began to save my work and I noticed the computer started flickering and then it gave me the shutdown screen. I was kinda mad since I did not save my work yet, but I thought that maybe I thought I just clicked something wrong. When the computer finally came back up, it showed a nice green icon in the tool bar again and I thought I was safe. I was also in luck that Vista recovered my work which was very nice.
Another couple of days passed and Onecare done another scan, ran another backup, with a nice little chart of what it had done. I thought that this was the best software that I have ever owned! Unfortunately this is also where I started having major problems. The next time the onecare software updated itself I got a yellow icon my tool bar stating that I had to restart my computer. After the restart onecare was still yellow, the problem was that it still needed to update. So I manually clicked the update link and nothing happened, it sat there for over 5 hours and it did not download anything. It acted like it was frozen.
From the software I clicked the help button, and it pointed me to the website where I tried all the recommendations instructions all the way to reinstalling the software. So I did just that, I reinstalled the software! When setup was complete, it showed a nice green icon again. I am not sure what happened but I thought I was in the clear. About 1 week went by and the software found it’s first virus!
The report on the virus(es) was weird, it said that it could not remove it, and that the quarantine has failed so again I went thru all the steps from the help menu to the website, with no luck! So that’s when I placed a help desk ticket about the problem. A few hours later I got someone telling me to do a few steps to show a report, I follow the instructions, but it did not work, I could not even complete the instructions because of an error. So I reply to the email and got another person who told me to do the exact same thing. Like an idoit, I maybe have thought I might have missed a step and followed the instructions again, and got the same error from the software and I sent the reply to support asking what to do.
This went on for about 8 days, each time I got a different person, I must have talked to about 25 different people during this process. By this time my Icon Changed from green to yellow again, it was not updating at all. So I did the same thing that helped last time, I uninstalled the program and downloaded another fresh copy from the One Care website. After the setup, reboot, scan and backup I got a nice green icon on my toolbar and no viruses found!.
I would say another 4 days went by and my nice little green icon had turned to yellow again! I manually clicked the update button, and my computer just froze. After about 10 minutes of this, I used CTRL + ALT + DELETE to figure out why the computer just stopped working, I tried to close the ONECARE processes and I got the blue screen of death, this was the first time it has ever happened to me since I was using Vista! I quickly rebooted the computer and it came right back up, but it did not allow me to log back in, I keep getting errors at the log in screen that a group policy failed to load and the computer just restarted by itself.
Since I was using an user account as my main account, I logged into my admin account, it got half way thru logging in where I could see the desktop and I got the blue screen of death again, after restarting I could not login, getting the exact same errors as my user account got.
I tried everything to save my work, Safe Mode, Command-line, Restore to previous date and nothing worked! So I removed the hard drive and installed it into another computer, and took control of the files and that’s when my old Virus software found over 40+ viruses on that hard drive, after it cleaned it up, I managed to save my work.
Oh, the backup feature from OneCare that I liked so much used over 170 gigs from my 500 gig external, it created a folder called OneCare and then it starting making sub groups of folders. I am not sure where all this data came from but since I don’t have OneCare anymore I can’t use it.. From now on I am going to stick with Vista’s backup feature, It uses tons less space and it’s free!
It’s now 3 Aug 2008 and I am trying my best to get a refund, I don’t think that well happen but I have not had very good luck with OneCare and I am not a satisfied customer by a long shot. Most likely the only thing I can do after using the program for only 3 months is cancel my subscription.
By trial and error here is the best software that I have used.
Macafee and Spyware Doctor - This is what I originally had on my computer, Macafee stopped all processes before it happened, it became a pain when installing software because I had to open up Macafee and allow it, no pop-ups to choose from.. but it did work great with Spyware Doctor.
I am now testing out Spyware Doctor as the Antivirus, it came out but I never have tried it until now.. they also came out with a free version of ThreatFire, you could pay for it if you wanted to but it seems to work great.. Threatfire monitors your internet connection such as wifi and cable connections for suspicious activity, so far it has stopped about 4 infections from other computers on the same network and I am very happy with it..
You can download ThreatFire free by clicking here
You can download Spyware Doctor by clicking here.
Tags: antivirus, onecare, spyware, spyware doctor, vista
