I was looking for do a cleanup of my registry and I came across the free Beta version of OneCare Safety scanner. Let me talk about the OneCare client that I already own. Some of the reasons I purchased this products are -
- It comes with a 3 PC license (perfect for me). I have noticed that some of the other popular suites have started following the same norm of selling license for 3 PCs.
- The background process it fairly light-weight as compared to the other products I have used.
- The subscription based as compared to product based. What I mean by that is - if you purchase a 2007 version of the product, you will get the updates for that only. If the company releases a 2008 version within the 1 year of your subscription, you don’t get it for free. However if Microsoft releases a version 2.5 or even 3 while I have the subscription, I will get it for free. So basically, I bought subscription and not product.
- It has fairly good 64-bit support for my Vista Ultimate 64-bit. (Thought you will have to download the latest installer and use that instead of the DVD).
- There is a very well made backup and restore feature that can be used to backup the PC to an external drive or another PC. (I was using this up until I built my Windows Home Server. Read more about that in previous posts.)
Now, coming back to the online version of OneCare Safety scanner (beta for vista). IT comes with a comprehensive (which you can customize to run only selected scans) and quick scan options. The scans included are -
- Virus scan
- Spyware scan
- Disk Fragmentation scan
- Disk Cleanup scan
- Registry cleaner scan
- Open ports scan
The complete scan took about 2 hours for me and was pretty thorough. I understand that you can have all these done using some of the utilities included with Windows and some free 3rd-party utilities. That is what I had been doing in the past as well, but it is nice to have a one-stop place for all your needs. Microsoft recommends to run this once a month, however the way I install/uninstall software for trying software, games and the amount of data I move around, I think once a fortnight will be more helpful.
Posted by admin in system, windows
