I have talked about what a piece of sh*t Windows Live OneCare is previously.
OneCare is Microsoft’s entry into the security arena. I have serious reservations about the ethics of Microsoft selling OneCare. It suddenly gives Microsoft a financial incentive to write buggy software. You can just imagine if, up to now, there was a financial dis-incentive for Microsoft to write buggy software and the quality of the software was poor just how bad the software will be now that they are selling OneCare.
That may go some way to explaining the many bugs in Vista!
Having said all that, I was contacted by Microsoft yesterday to tell me that they were sending me a new version of OneCare to install on the Vista laptop they sent me earlier this year.
I’ll give it another go, I said. Just to try it out and see how effective it is. Silly me.
I spent four hours today trying to get this piece of crap to work on the laptop. The last two of those four hours I was on to Microsoft tech support. They eventually gave up at 3:30pm and said they’d have to escalate it and I would get call back in an hour. That was eight hours ago. I’m still waiting for the call.
The number of re-starts required for this was completely ridiculous. It seemed like any time any change at all was made to OneCare, a re-start was required.
When nothing else worked, I had to uninstall Norton Internet Security. Restart required.
To install OneCare, if you have a previous version installed (working or not) you have to uninstall the previous version. To uninstall OneCare, you have to download something called OneCare Cleanup Tool! You find this out after you do a normal uninstall and it still doesn’t uninstall properly. Seriously! How bloody difficult would it have been to build the Cleanup Tool into the installer?
Even Microsoft don’t know what the errors OneCare throws up means. At one point I received the error “No plans available”
Of course, copying the error text and putting it into a search box on OneCare support yields the helpful answer “We did not find any results for ….”
Windows Live OneCare is unusable. Don’t even bother wasting your time trying it.
UPDATE: It is now 30 hours since Microsoft tech support told me they would ring me “in an hour” and still no-one has called me back.
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