A few months ago I decided to rebuild my home laptop, once I installed Vista and all the drivers and stuff, it came to the point that I’d usually install McAfee AV… and I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.
Now I’m sure McAfee does a great job detecting Viruses, but without exception every computer I use it on seems to grind to a halt afterwards. Whether this is the software or something I’m doing I don’t know… but either way I decided to look for an alternative.
It was then I remembered an email I’d received about a OneCare beta program, so I went off the the MS site, signed up and installed the app. It wasn’t until I got the notification that the beta program was ending that I remembered that I’d installed it. In one way that’s bad as I didn’t provide any feedback to the dev team, but actually the fact I didn’t have to is pretty encouraging.
Once installed OneCare just sat there and did its thing. I can’t say that I noticed any performance hit at all, and with the laptop being quite old and slow I probably would have noticed – I certainly did with McAfee.
So what’s the point of this post? Well really just to give some credit where credit is due. I like OneCare (as much as you can like some security/AV software anyway!) it does a good job and offers some useful functionality (I won’t go into details as they’re all on the web). In fact I signed up for a year and get cover for three PC’s included in the cost.