Matt Charlton

With OneCare out of action I needed an Anti Virus solution.  Things have come on in the last month or so with Kapersky, Norton and AVG all having updated their products to support Windows 7.  AVG’s link takes you to their commercial product page.  AVG Free works just fine though

Doing a defrag of my C:, it was 10% fragmented.  One of my biggest bugbears about Vista was that you couldn’t tell how fragmented a drive was, once you started a defrag there was no way to tell what was going on. 

I know there were problems with the defragmenter in XP and the status updates weren’t always accurate, it was always nice to have an overall picture though.  Windows 7 brings this back, to a point.  It will now tell you how fragmented a drive is and show you the % completion when defragging.  It’s now showing me as consolidating.  Pass 1 54% consolidated. 

Startup seems fairly quick, aside from iTunes not autostarting when I plug my iPhone in, everything seems to be running okay.

Oh, and Media Centre works a treat, installed the K-Lite Codec Pack and it was playing avi’s that the 360 refused to play before (in video library and in MCE). 

So far so good.  Will continue to test on this laptop with a view to a fresh install on the PC upstairs (it’s overdue anyway), if that goes okay and Sue wants to try it out I’ll update her machine.  Possibly a clean install on there as it’s been a while.  Then again she has a load of data that I can’t be arsed moving across.  It might have to be an upgrade :p

Well, it would appear I’m the only person that didn’t know this. 

In June 2009, Microsoft are phasing out the subscription service for OneCare, their all in one Antivirus, Antispyware solution. 

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Microsoft-to-Phase-Out-Windows-Live-OneCare/

Now my reasoning for using OneCare is simple.  It seems to work pretty well, I hate Norton’s all in one solution and logic dictates that if anyone should know how to protect their operating system it would be Microsoft.

I’ve just had to switch IE8 to compatibility mode.  Obviously WordPress 2.7 does something that MS don’t like – I kept typing, it kept going out of the right hand side of the edit box and off the page.  Super. 

So, back to the point.  I managed to get hold of three Windows 7 beta keys yesterday.  The plan was to run it on my laptop for a while, upgrade Sue’s laptop and the main PC and see how we go.  See what the compatibility is like and see how it runs.  Also interested in the Media Centre stuff and how it’s updated (if at all) to work with the Xbox 360.  Still chasing that xvid compatibility for MCE. 

I performed an upgrade rather than a fresh install – I’ve reinstalled the OS on this laptop more than enough times the last few months.  The pre-upgrade check pulled The Sims 2 as having possible issues with Windows 7 but nothing else.  After I’d booted into the new OS Daemon tools decided it wasn’t going to be compatible and OneCare is dead. 

Now I remember from the pre-beta build I was looking at pre-Xmas that OneCare didn’t work, I presumed they were working on it and they’d release a new version.  My subscription is up in February so I’d ordered another OEM pack from Amazon (£16 rather than the £40 MS charge). 

This morning I’ve opened a support ticket with billing, I want a refund.  I’m just glad I didn’t pay out £40.  Then I’d have been really annoyed. 

More info to come on Windows 7 as I find it.