It’s been in beta for ages, but Microsoft have finally rolled out the final stable release of Windows Live OneCare beta 2.0. I have to say, I’m slightly disappointed with it to be honest, given the importance of this release.

Why? Well, for one thing, the new “OneCare circle” annoys the hell out of me. If your computer is the hub, and another computer in the “circle” has something wrong with it, the OneCare icon on your computer will turn orange or red. So, as our other Vista box hadn’t performed a tune-up since I installed OneCare 2.0 on it, I kept getting shouted at on my computer to fix it.

You don’t have to use the OneCare circle though, as I found out. Just don’t set any computer in the house as the “hub” pc, as then the other computers will still work on the same subscription, but won’t nag the hell out of the hub. I found out this about an hour after I upgraded both of our original OC installations to the new version.

Another feature of the new release is Photo Backup. For an extra subscription fee, (I’m not sure how much) you can store photos on up to 10GB of Microsoft server space. One question I would like to direct at Microsoft is “Why the hell just photos?”. I mean, people don’t just have photos on their computer, or is that me? And if people want to back stuff up, why not just buy a cheap external hard drive that you can put anything on, and keep forever. In my opinion this feature is one of the most pointless things that the OneCare team have put into the software.

Yet another new feature that they have built into OneCare is Print Sharing. Yeah, a pretty basic feature of most operating systems, but inside the settings window you can check an option that lets you share every single printer in your OneCare circle, which is all three of your computers. I haven’t tried it because we use a print server, and I can’t be bothered to plug in my Epson R300 into my computer and start faffing about sharing it with my internet security software, so I don’t know if you need to have the same network domain or anything like that.

I can’t really see any other changes other than that, other than they’ve juggled with the interface somewhat and rearranged the settings, oh, and they’ve added an interface that lets you stop programs from running when you boot up. Apart from that, it’s just plain old OneCare 1.6 or whatever they finished up on.