Windows Live OneCare Team Blog

Hello OneCare customers,

If you’ve used our Help and Support in the past, you may have noticed some changes last week. Along with the latest release of OneCare, we’ve made some changes to our online flow for getting help and contacting support. If you’re using the OneCare client click on “Get Help with Windows Live OneCare.”  If you have already been auto-upgraded to the new version of OneCare 2.0, then you will notice that we now have some easy to run repairs on your PC. We’ll be updating these repairs on a regular basis in the coming months and hope that they will serve to solve common issues with your PC.

To see our online help topics click on “Visit Online Help Center,” or the “Go Online” button.

In addition, based on all your feedback, we’ve modified the on-line support and help experience to help make it easier for you to find the information you’re looking for:

Step 1) Once you get to our online help topics you will notice our Instant Help tool in the middle of the page. You can enter a question and get a response, or you can also use our more traditional search in the upper left hand corner of the window. If you find the answer you’re looking for, great!

If not, for further assistance you will need to click on “Get more help” in the bottom right hand corner of the window, followed by clicking on “Get Support”

Step 2) To make sure we put in touch with the right agents to respond to your questions, you will need to fill out a short form regarding the nature of your issue.

Step 3) Next, you will need to provide your Windows Live ID or Product ID used to purchase and activate OneCare. These field(s) should be pre-populated if you are an existing subscriber and have the latest version of OneCare installed and activated. If you are using the product as a free trial or have not been able to install or activate the product you will need to select the “I have a trial/beta version of OneCare” radio button and continue.

Step 4) Finally, you will arrive at a form that displays your support options and allows you to create a support incident. Additionally, you will have the option to upload “Diagnostics” that can be used by the support agents to analyze the problem on your PC. If you are an existing OneCare customer and have installed and activated your client you should see all your support options, including phone. For free trial or beta users or those who have not yet activated their OneCare subscription, you will only have access email support until you purchase or active your service.

P.S. Curious about how to find your Windows Live Id and Product ID for OneCare?

To find your Product ID or Windows Live ID open the OneCare Client, click on the Help drop down in the right hand corner of the main screen and select “About Windows Live OneCare.” If you have activated the client you should see your Windows Live ID member name and the Product ID.

That’s it. By going through our new help flow you will have continued access to automated repairs for your PC, the most current help topics, and tracking of your support incidents with your OneCare subscription so that OneCare support professionals can have access to your support history. As always we love to hear your feedback, so please let us know how this new experience works for you!

Best Regards,

Marisela Cerda

Windows Live OneCare Support Experience Program Manager and Guest Blogger

We’ve just released significant enhancements to the Windows Live OneCare service, designed to help you to more easily care for all of the PCs covered by your subscription.

Here are just a few of the new features that you’ll see:

·         The new OneCare Circle provides a single view that you can use to monitor the security and maintenance of your networked PCs. The OneCare circle also enables one-click actions to resolve issues among computers within a home PC network

·         Printer sharing support helps you easily share the printers that are connected to your networked PCs —now the whole family can use the same printer.

·         Speedier PC start times via removal of rarely used applications from the Start menu. Look for this on the enhanced Monthly Report.

·         Configuration monitoring that makes fixes and recommendations designed to help you get the most out of your computing experience.

These enhancements and more will be automatically delivered to all subscribers over the next several weeks. Windows Live OneCare will tell you when the update is starting and ask you to restart when it’s complete. Then you’ll be ready to start enjoying all of the new features that are now included in OneCare.

If you’d like to learn more about this update or would like to try Windows Live OneCare for 90 days, please visit http://onecare.live.com.

We have recently been hearing some concerns that Windows Live OneCare has changed settings in Windows Update to allow for automatic installation of important updates, and that some PCs are rebooting as a result. 

In the first OneCare boot experience we have gone to great lengths to disclose that OneCare may automatically effect changes to user settings in order to help best protect the user. When you first install Windows Live OneCare, setup informs you that if you choose to proceed your computer settings will be changed to automatically download and install important updates from Microsoft Update (a Microsoft service that provides software updates for Windows components and other Microsoft programs). You may still choose whether or not to install recommended and optional updates. 

OneCare is built for people who don't want to worry about protecting and maintaining their PC. This behavior is by design and is not unique to the latest version of OneCare.  It helps ensure that your computer continues to receive important updates as soon as possible after they are released. As extra protection, Windows Live OneCare also checks your computer for missing software updates during Tune-up. If any missing updates are found, or if your computer's Automatic Updates settings get changed, you receive an “Action to Take”, helping you to correct the problem. 

We are evaluating user feedback and will be revisiting how we communicate the installation details of Windows Live OneCare as we are continually working to improve that experience. Windows Live OneCare simplifies PC care, making it easy to manage performance, backup and security for your home or small office PCs. In addition, OneCare was built with privacy in mind, and Microsoft takes that very seriously – every new feature or setting change is reviewed and approved by Microsoft’s privacy experts. 
 

As always, we appreciate your feedback.
The Windows Live OneCare team

We’re pleased to report that Windows Live OneCare just received the VB100 award from Virus Bulletin.  This award comes on the heels of OneCare’s recent re-certification from West Coast Labs and the ICSA Labs.  Together, these accolades are a strong endorsement of OneCare’s powerful anti-malware tools and mean that OneCare protects customers from known threats on the market today.

We’ll continue our ongoing work to keep PCs safe and secure.  In the meantime, we’re honored that top testing bodies endorse the powerful protection that OneCare provides as a part of an all-in-one PC care offering.

Thanks for your continued feedback,
Gina (OneCare guest blogger)

We’re happy to report that the top independent certification authorities in the security industry, West Coast Labs and the ICSA, just re-certified OneCare.  These ongoing certifications are an important validation of our work and mean that OneCare’s anti-malware tools are strong enough to protect customers from known threats in the market today.

For those of you that don’t follow the security industry closely, one of the reasons certification from West Coast Labs and the ICSA is considered significant is that their testing methodologies reflect malware threats “out in the wild.”  Testing in this manner provides an accurate indication of how security products perform against real world threats.  We’re pleased OneCare passed these rigorous tests and will continue our work to keep your PCs safe and secure.

For additional information on Microsoft’s anti-malware efforts in general, Security Research and Response GM Vinny Gullotto recently posted a summary on the anti-malware engineering team blog.  Check it out.

Thanks for your continued feedback,
Gina (OneCare guest blogger)

Today is “Update Tuesday”, the second Tuesday of each month when Microsoft regularly releases software updates to help address vulnerabilities in Microsoft products and alerts PC users to steps they should take to update the security on their PCs.  As part of this routine, monthly security update cycle, Microsoft released seven security bulletins today.  You can check out a full list of the vulnerabilities that were addressed by heading to the Microsoft’s Security Response Center’s blog at: http://blogs.technet.com/msrc/

Why is this important?  Many OneCare customers may not have heard of Update Tuesday for one simple reason: aside from a few instances, OneCare and Windows take care of downloading all the new updates to your PC automatically, saving you time and energy.  In keeping with the OneCare philosophy, you do not need to take any action to ensure these updates are installed to your PC as OneCare configures your Windows PC so you’re automatically protected.  All you need to do is make sure you are connected to the internet and you are good to go! 

 These security updates are part of the normal process Microsoft takes to help make sure your system stays safe and secure.  OneCare will continue handle this and other tasks like disk defragmentation and automatic file backup so you never need to worry about it.

Thanks for your continued feedback,
Gina (OneCare guest blogger)

It’s been awhile since we’ve posted – time just flies when you’re working on OneCare!

OneCare Launched Around the World
Okay, some updates since the last time we posted.  Thanks to all of you, the international launch of OneCare v1.5 has been a solid success.  Customers around the world are now using the service and telling us how much they like the simplicity, ease-of-use and great price of OneCare.  And for those of you that don’t already have OneCare in your countries, we hear you and appreciate your patience – rest assured we are looking at continuing to expand the service to new markets.

Since the launch, we’ve also heard some great suggestions around functionality improvements and features.  As you know, OneCare is an evolving service and we’re taking those suggestions to heart as we look toward future releases.  And, as always, as new functionality and updates to the service are available, you – as existing OneCare customers – will automatically get those new things when they are available as a part of your service subscription.

OneCare’s Dedication to Our Customers
I wanted to address the recent reports of the anti-malware protection in OneCare performing poorly in test results from various anti-virus testing organizations.  The team at Microsoft that runs the anti-malware engine that is part of the OneCare service has also posted today some specific thoughts on the issue here http://blogs.technet.com/antimalware/, but I wanted to share some thoughts on behalf of the OneCare team.

OneCare is tested by numerous organizations around the world and is certified anti-virus protection by two of the industry’s leading independent certification authorities: International Computer Security Association (ICSA) Labs and West Coast Labs.  These labs are widely recognized as key authorities within the industry for research, intelligence, and certification testing of anti-malware products.  Both ICSA and West Coast Labs employ testing methodologies that reflect malware threats that are “out in the wild” and we believe these tests serve as important measures of OneCare’s performance against real world threats.  Beyond these particular certification authorities, though, we are also definitely looking closely at the methodology and results of other recently reported tests from other organizations around the globe for any insights that may help our ongoing work to enhance OneCare and to help ensure the most effective level of protection and service that we can provide our customers.   

It is important for OneCare customers to know that we remain committed to the security and maintenance of their PCs.  As you know, OneCare provides PC care and security using a holistic and layered approach, focusing on multi-layer and multi-point protection.  This means that in addition to integrated anti-virus and antispyware real-time checks of all executed files and regular complete scans, OneCare also helps protect your PC with a two-way managed firewall to stop unwanted network traffic.  OneCare also ensures that your data is backed up properly so that in the event of computer failure due to malware issues or other unexpected circumstances, data can be restored quickly and easily.  And OneCare works to help ensure that you are getting the benefits of anti-phishing technology in Internet Explorer 7 to help protect from suspicious websites when browsing the Internet.  OneCare will continue to treat the care of your PC in a holistic way and will work to continue making PC care and maintenance a simple and hassle-free experience for our customers.

We truly appreciate your business and are committed to earning it every day.   If you have questions, concerns or comments, please continue to reach out and let us know.

All the best,
Gina Narkunas, Lead Product Manager and OneCare team guest blogger

P.S. OneCare and .PST and .DBX Bug -- Fixed
In the last few days, there has been a lot of confusion about a bug we had in the service that was causing Windows Live OneCare to erroneously quarantine some customers’ Outlook .pst and Outlook Express .dbx files when infections were found within the .pst and .dbx files.  We released a new anti-malware engine to all customers on Sunday (March 11) that fixed the issue and anyone whose PCs have been connected to the Internet should have automatically gotten this fix.  Overall, we know that only a very small number of customers had files that were ultimately affected by this issue, and we apologize for any inconvenience this caused.

Again, no action is necessary to get the fix – OneCare will self-update for it – but if anyone still wants to manually confirm that they have received the most recent anti-malware engine, you can do so via the following steps:

1.            Click “Change OneCare Settings” in the Main OneCare user interface
2.            Click the “Logging” Tab
3.            Click the “Create support log” button
4.            Scroll down to the “Virus and Spyware Versions:” section and check your AM Engine version number.  If the text says the numbers “2306” after the 1.1. number – such as AM Engine:(1.1.2306.0) – your engine has been updated already.  If a number smaller than “2306” appears, your engine may still need updating.  To update, ensure your computer is connected to the Internet, then click the “Check for updates” link in the main OneCare user interface and OneCare will download and install the fix.

For customers whose Outlook .pst and Outlook Express .dbx files had been quarantined prior to this fix and engine update, you should take the following steps to recover your email:

1.            Close Outlook or Outlook Express
2.            Click Change OneCare Settings in the Main OneCare user interface
3.            Click on the Viruses & Spyware Tab
4.            And then click on the Quarantine button and then select the .pst or .dbx file and then click on Restore.

Recent reports about this bug conveyed that OneCare actually deleted Outlook files, which is not accurate and has caused some confusion in the community.  It is important to clarify that although in certain cases OneCare might automatically delete a piece of malware, OneCare does not delete archive files such as .pst or .dbx files, nor does the design of the service allow users to set OneCare to automatically delete such files when quarantined.  To delete whole archive files, such as those .pst and .dbx files that were erroneously being quarantined by OneCare prior to the fix issued this weekend, the design of the service is such that it would require someone manually deleting these files from the quarantine dialog in order for them to actually be deleted.  And if a customer is facing a rare situation where their full .pst or .dbx files had somehow been manually deleted, they may be able to use the backup and restore functionality offered by OneCare to restore files from the last time they were backed up.  We have also seen some instances where customers attempted to do a system restore after their .pst or .dbx files were quarantined and then could no longer find the files in their quarantine list – not that the files are deleted, just that they can’t find them.  For any customers who are still having problems recovering your lost files – or if you just want to talk to someone to figure out what’s going on – please, please contact our support team… we can help. 

Welcome back to all those that were on vacation, and a happy new year. As you may have noticed from relative inactivity in my blogging, it’s been quite a hectic time here on the product development team. We’ve been hard at work on our next release, and I am pleased to let you know that we hit an important milestone right before the end of the year. That is, our development and test work is done on the next major release of OneCare, and as we announced about a month ago, it will indeed be available – both at retail and on the Web - at the end of January. There may be some slight variations by country, but for the most part, you should be able to download or buy in just a few weeks. And for those of you who already subscribe, you need to do – nothing. You’ll automatically receive this major upgrade, just as you receive minor upgrades throughout the year, as part of your OneCare subscription.

For all you beta testers, we greatly appreciate the feedback you’ve provided. This release was particularly challenging with respect to the testing, since we had to make sure it worked well on a new OS (Windows Vista), and on many new language platforms. Although we have a great test team spread around the world, there is no feedback like user feedback, and we got plenty of it. I am also pleased to know that all of you who wanted to install OneCare on your non-English PCs will be able to purchase OneCare officially in your markets. While we don’t cover the whole world, we are looking forward to creating long-lasting relationships with customers in nearly 20 countries (and counting).

A few other house-keeping things to mention. There have been a number of good questions on the blog about OneCare – some regarding specific features, and others regarding help and support issues. I know it can be very frustrating when things don’t work as you expect. However, I would strongly encourage any user with problems or issues using OneCare to go to our Help Center (http://www.windowsonecare.com/support/Default.aspx). We have a great tool for instant support that is continuously fine-tuned to answer users’ most frequent questions, and it also has compiled a large database of issues that can help you quickly solve your problem. Generally, this is the fastest way to get an issue resolved. But, if you can’t get a good answer, or still need support, you can always contact the OneCare support team. As we’ve mentioned many times, part of our mission is to provide great service – both when using the product and interacting with us – so we frequently poll customers on their level of satisfaction. It is encouraging that a very high percentage of our customers are highly satisfied with their support experience, either using the online tools or interacting with support agents. So, please be assured we can help you with OneCare problems you may have.

I also want to note, for those that are a bit more technically inclined, we have a very active and extremely well-informed set of users that post questions and answers to our forums. If you have a specific question, and are comfortable reading through and acting on self-help info on the Web, this is your place to go: http://forums.microsoft.com/windowsonecare/default.aspx?siteid=2. I’d also like to thank our most prolific MVP – Stephen Boots – who consistently posts thoughtful, informed, and helpful comments to the forums. Thanks Stephen, and all the other MVPs that do such a great job answering questions and moderating the forums.

At this point, you may be wondering why we have multiple sites for user feedback, and how we use them. It is important to note that the blog is a great forum for us to report on developments, latest news, common questions, etc. It isn’t the best place for frequent back and forth dialogue, which is why you don’t see many direct responses to comments on the blog. Please know that we read every comment on the blog, but won’t likely be responding to most of them. The forum, however, is a great place for give and take. As I mentioned, there is a very active community of users that are both passionate and knowledgeable about our product, and they probably do as good a job as we do in responding to questions, and providing help on a range of issues. To be clear, these are not Microsoft employees, and this is not an official support channel, but it has been ranked one of the most active (and effective) forums on Microsoft.com. We monitor all the forum postings, and are consistently pleased with the quality of content there. So, if you’ve got a unique technical problem that requires support, please go to the help center. If you’d like to make a general comment on OneCare – or say something specifically to me or other guest bloggers – please post your comment on the blog. If you are looking for community assistance on a topic area, or want advice from someone that may have a targeted answer to your question, please try the forum.

Thanks for your comments across all the different channels – we really do appreciate it. And in the interest of responding to blog feedback, I will be posting a general “round-up” in the next week or two to address some of the more common questions and comments on the blog. Also look for some additional postings as we head toward availability of our next major release (v1.5) at the end of January.

Kind regards,

Yoav

We have some more good news to share.  As you know, our team is constantly working to evolve the OneCare product and service to ensure you get the most up-to-date features that help protect and maintain your PC.  I am pleased to share that we are releasing new functionality in OneCare to help better protect users from the threat of phishing scams online.

Beginning today, OneCare will now assist with the activation of phishing protection with IE7’s Microsoft Phishing Filter.  The filter was designed to help protect customers from the threat of ‘phishing’ – as most of you know by now - a form of online fraud which mimics legitimate, trusted sites in order to trick people into sharing personal or sensitive information which is later sold, or used for ID theft purposes, etc.  Microsoft Phishing Filter helps protect people from sharing personal information with bogus websites by warning customers when a site looks suspicious, and blocks people from unwittingly sharing personal information with known, reported phishing sites. 

As you may recall, we mentioned this anti-phishing technology in the blog in August when we introduced OneCare Advisor.  Since then, it has received very positive feedback from users, and we think it’s one of the best phishing filters available.  We have also tried to independently verify our filter’s effectiveness - you can read a recent study by 3Sharpe that highlights our fairly unique approach to anti-phishing protection at: http://www.jeffersonwells.com/client_audit_reports/main.htm. 

Now, what do you, as OneCare customers, need to do to make sure you have these phish-fighting capabilities?  Very little.  In keeping with OneCare’s worry-free service, you will automatically receive the IE7 anti-phishing technology.  So if you haven’t already turned it on, when OneCare prompts you to turn on the Microsoft Phishing Filter over the next few days, you can just click yes and you’ll be good to go.  From there, OneCare will help ensure Microsoft Phishing Filter automatically monitors suspicious sites as you’re browsing to help keep you and your family protected against phishing scams.