Good price - great boot times.
So far I've had a great experience with OneCare 2.0. The biggest thing for me was that it didn't hurt the performance of my computer after I installed it. I've tried other anti-virus/firewall software and they have all hurt the performance of my machine especially during boot. It also was very easy to install and configure.

There are a few things I don't like about it. The backup utility only lets you select backing up your machine daily, weekly, every 2 weeks or every 4 weeks. I would like this to be more flexible. Also, I haven't found a way to configure the tune-up process, I really don't want to defrag every time I go through tune-up. Tune-up also doesn't have much flexibility on when it is done, every 1, 2, 3, or 4 weeks. Finally, the packaging is horrible.

Overall I've been very happy with it and I think it is great product.

A good product
Microsoft OneCare is a good product by a good manufacturer. It's not great but it seems to do the job I need it to do. I think it's a good product for an individual of average or below average technology awareness to help protect them. The impact on resources is fairly low with the exception of the requirement for Windows Update on XP. I have Windows Vista and XP stations in my circle.

Good, but not great...
I had originally thought of getting this product for our son who is off to college in the fall. Right now all of our household computers are hooked into Microsoft Windows Home Server OEM so our anti-virus and backups are centrally managed. However, when he leaves for college that won't be an option for him. I wanted something that was easy to use and didn't bog his laptop down. Unfortunately, although OneCare is a good product, it just didn't fit the bill.

First off, let me say the product has a lot of nice features -- including automated backups, firewall, anti-virus and more rolled into one thing. However, as I've learned in the past, sometimes rolling too many features into a product can give you a less than stellar offering. It's hard to be the "best" in every category -- and I think this is where OneCare suffers.

I found the Firewall to be terribly annoying. I prefer to leave software-based firewalls turned OFF because hardware-based firewalls are much more reliable. When I did this I got not one, but two red icons in my task area on Windows XP that would not go away. Unlike the built-in firewall with Windows XP/Vista, turning OneCare's firewall off does not give you the option to ignore the condition and remove the red icons. In this way I felt the program was way too demanding to be wanting to do everything when all I wanted was a subset of its features.

Next, I noticed that the backup feature of OneCare and the backup feature of Windows Home Server was not integrating correctly. The product states that it "recognizes" the backup feature of WHS, but I found out that two backups were trying to occur every night. I searched around some and couldn't find any real documentation or options for fixing the problem.

The anti-virus feature worked well, and in fact seemed to run just a bit faster than my current anti-virus program, Avast. Updates happened automatically and it was pretty much non-intrusive. No complaints there.

There were other features that would be handy for novice users, such as cleaning up the temporary files that Windows and IE seem to leave around as well as a feature to scan your system for missed updates, etc. Again, these are features a novice user might enjoy so they don't have to manage their computer as much.

However, my overall impression was that OneCare is "good" but just doesn't make it into the "great" category. I'd say if you have one or two PC's without a home network then this program will work for you just fine. If you are a more tech-savy computer user then you'll probably find yourself fighting the program more than getting a lot of value out of it.

set it and forget it
Have used this program since it was in its beta stage. Don't have to worry about defraging, backing up or virus protection, plus live support is good. But ---Amazon.com is the only place to buy it. Much cheaper than renewing through Microsoft each year.

OneCare Backup Really Works
I have been using OneCare since it came out over a year ago. I had been using Norton/Symmantec products before that. OneCare seems to run much more effieciently. When it does its scheduled virus definition updates, virus scans, defrag, file cleanup, etc, you don't notice the huge performance drop like with Norton. And the backups take very little time (after the first one) since they are incremental, even if backing up to DVD rather than hard drive. Norton caused my older laptop to barely function. Norton is very hard to get rid of, especially versions 2002 and older. Under OneCare the old laptop breezes along though I did have to reload the operating system & all it's software to get rid of Norton. The hard drive eventually died unexpectedly but since I had the OneCare backups I was able to restore everything I needed. My only complaint is that since I didn't want to restore everything, I could only search for filenames. It would not return directory names and I would have liked to be able to restore several entire directories.

A downside of the backups is that they are encrypted and you can not access them without having OneCare installed. But you could always download the trial version and use it to get the backup restored.

When you buy the boxed version (usually cheaper than downloading it), you don't really need anything inside except the license key. The software on the CD justs links you to the latest version on the web. The box is big and hard to open. Must be a theft-prevention thing since it wastes materials. The plastic is probably recyclable, though.

I have it installed on two of my pc's and have installed it on the PC's of several friends. It does require having a (free) Windows Live ID which you need to remember so you can install it on additional PC's (up to three). When you renew (get key from new boxed version) the one-year renewal period doesn't start until the old one expires so you can extend your subscription any time you find a good sale on OneCare, though I only tried this about a month in advance of the expiration date.