Microsoft Windows Live OneCare 2.5 review

Microsoft's OneCare is sold as a comprehensive PC care service for Windows, but it performed badly in our malware test.

This wasn't helped by its lack of an email scanner, but it also failed to pick up many of the web-based threats we exposed it to. However, it was one of only two scanners that didn't mistake any of our false positive test programs for malware.

The main screen took several seconds to load on our test systems. Essential features, such as on-demand virus scanning, are relegated to tiny text links.

OneCare provides a convenient interface for scheduled backups (although it lacks BullGuard's bundled online storage) and a PC Tune Up feature that is really just an interface to existing Windows tools.

The settings menu lets you schedule scans, tune-ups and backups in the background. Also buried in these menus are firewall configuration options, the ability to stop some programs running at startup, a list of quarantined files and promotional information about Microsoft's OneCare Online Photo Backup subscription service, which allows you to store up to 50GB of images online for a fee.

Like BitDefender, OneCare allows you to link other PCs on your local network that also have OneCare installed, although you can include a maximum of three in your OneCare Circle. This allows you to protect and monitor them all from a single system, as well as share a centralised backup device and even a printer with the rest of your circle.

When we connected our PC to a different network, OneCare asked us to categorise it as secure or insecure and adjusted the level of access and firewall protection accordingly. This is handy if you use your laptop on more than one network.

OneCare is inexpensive and integrates well with Windows, but slow loading speeds and awful performance in our malware prevention and removal tests let it down. As we went to press, Microsoft announced that it will cease selling OneCare from June 2009.