So what other programs are rated much, much higher than OneCare? We already know about G Data Security’s AntiVirusKit  at 99.45%. No.2 on the list is AEC’s TrustPort AV at 99.36%, Avira’s AntiVir PE Premium at 98.85%, Kaspersky Lab’s Kaspersky AV at 97.9% and then MicroWorld’s eScan Anti-Virus at 97.9%.

Interestingly Symantec’s Norton Anti-Virus came in at 96.8%, GriSoft’s AVG was 96.3% and McAfee’s VirusScan at 91.6%, meaning that while these big names did much better than OneCare, they have some work to do as well to get ever close to a pure 100% detection rate.
 
The report indicates the methodology of the testing for those wanting the details, which involved a big range of viruses, polymorphic viruses, worms, rootkits, Trojans, scripts, backdoors, spyware and dialers.

Given that Microsoft has formally entered the Internet Security and anti-virus race, I’d like to see Microsoft winning future such tests, or at the very least doing dramatically better. I’d like to be optimistic and hold out hope that they’ll do this sooner rather than later, but if the classic Microsoft rule-of-threes applies in this instance, have a look how a future OneCare 3.0 scores in similar tests, where hopefully the surprise will not be how badly it performs, but how well it does instead.

But for now, the reality is simple: very shortly I’ll no longer be using Microsoft OneCare, and based on these results, you shouldn’t be using it either.
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