14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft's Windows Live OneCare is not the last and least anti-virus solution available on the market any more. The Redmond Company has obviously poured a lot of effort into its security solution in order to get it off the ground and out of the performance dump. Since launching Windows Live OneCare at the beginning of 2007, almost in tandem with Windows Vista, Microsoft has continuously hammered at antivirus. In mid March 2007, Microsoft announced the world-wide availability of Windows Live OneCare and aimed at explaining, with an apologetic tone, OneCare's failures in the VB100 and the AV comparatives antivirus tests.
Then on May 18th 2007, the Windows Live OneCare team revealed that Microsoft's security solution had been recertified by West Coast Labs and the ICSA, and at the beginning of this week, the antivirus evolved to the next version. Microsoft is offering OneCare 1.6 for download, an upgrade from v1.5. But this is only the start of the good news for Microsoft, because the latest tests run by Andreas Cleminti's AV Comparatives reveal a different perspective over OneCare. While Microsoft's antivirus managed to finish up last in the February 2007 test, OneCare made half of a decent comeback.
"The same products, with the same best possible detection settings that the scan engines had in the last comparative, were used for this test. For this test we used new samples received between 2 February and 2 May 2007, which were all new to any tested product," informed Cleminti. Out of the 17 antivirus products testes, Windows Live OneCare finished 14. According to Cleminti, none of the security solutions have been updated with virus signatures or with additional versions since February 2, 2007. "Even if most antivirus products provide daily or hourly [signature] updates, without heuristic/generic methods [of detection] there is always a time frame where the user is not protected," Cleminti said.
According to AV Comparatives, ESET LLC's NOD32 AntiVirus performed the best out of all security products, but aAvira GmbH's AntiVir PE Premium and Fortinet Inc.'s FortiClient delivered equally compelling performances only with excessive false positives out of the total 20,000 malware instances that were thrown against them.