My continuing saga using Windows Live OneCare...
Like most security products, this one puts an icon in the taskbar. This one glows green if everything is OK, yellow if there's somthing minor wrong, or red if there's something really wrong. For example, it'll glow red while your firewall is disabled.
By the way, that's one thing I really like about this product. In Windows XP, if you wanted to turn off the firewall, you could, but then you'd have to remember to turn it back on. With OneCare's replacement firewall, you get a more reasonable option:
Anyway, once you turn off the firewall, the taskbar icon glows red until you turn it back on. That's pure goodness!
What bothers me about OneCare is that, at least for me, the taskbar icon glows yellow all the time. At first, I'd always go look at the OneCare dashboard to see what was wrong, only to find that OneCare thought my computer needed updates. There's a button there that takes you to Windows Update, so naturally I'd click it to see what updates I was missing. 9 out of 10 times, I'd find that there were no high-priority updates for my computer. I have automatic updates turned on, so this isn't terribly surprising.
Looking in the forums, I found other people who have the same problem. They were told to contact OneCare support to try to figure out what update their computer needed. That just seems wrong.
So the yellow light I'm seeing from Windows Live OneCare is just that: a broken light. It's already got me trained to ignore it. Not good!
Posted
Jan 16 2008, 04:27 AM
by
keith-brown