Last place: Don't use Microsoft OneCare for antivirus

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Sunday, 04 March 2007 14:05

Your IT - Entertainment

Upon clicking ‘yes’ (or whatever the button was to give permission), OneCare then took me to a screen that simply stated words to the effect that it was cleaning up the virus. But instead of a useful progress bar, I simply got a progress bar that had a green block moving across the bar, from left to right again and again, not telling me anything useful, such as how much progress had been made, which you'd think is the point of a progress bar. All I knew was that it was working.

It took absolutely forever to eliminate the virus, with OneCare saying in the end that it had done the job, but the interface was bereft of any useful information, and frankly, I didn’t even need to know it was doing the job, or even need to be asked. It should have just done it, and if it was going to give me progress information, at least it could have been useful.

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.