Windows Live One Care is a “all in one” security suite of Microsoft products that protects your computer against firewall attacks, viruses, phishing website schemes and more. I was fairly satisfied with this product in its 1.0 version – however – that has all changed with the upgrade to 2.0. I would no longer recommend this product to anyone, so please read on!
Houston We Have a Problem!
It all began when I noticed that something was using up close to 100% of my CPU time. I quickly zeroed in on my services list (ALT-CTRL-DEL) and confirmed that services.exe was the culprit. My first incorrect assumption was that my computer had been hijacked and that this represented a virus, root-kit, spyware or mal-ware installation that had somehow slipped past Windows Live One Care. I spent days running virus and spy-ware scans, researching google and ultimately reinstalling windows when all hope had disappeared of recovering windows to its prior state of operations.
After about 10 hours of work installing all the microsoft updates from Windows Update, reinstalling applications, looking up software keys and then finally installing the latest version of Windows Live One Care – this nasty beast reared its ugly head. My computer began slowing to a crawl and a quick look at the services list revealed my worst fears. Services.exe was once again using 100% of the CPU time. Only this time there was a mysterious service popping up multiple times:
DW20.exe
This is a Microsoft error reporting services for Office 2003. But the strange thing about this was that I do not own or have installed Microsoft Office 2003. A quick review of the add/remove software from the control panel also revealed a few packages that are generally associated with Windows Vista included MS Compression kit 1.0 and a Windows Live-Drv package.
The solution to this mess was to uninstall Windows Live One Care and also the packages that were mysteriously installed without my knowledge. Immediately after a reboot my computer returned to its same zippy state of speed. And I was left wondering why a billion dollar company such as Microsoft would not take the time to adequately test a product that they charge $49.95 a year. Perhaps they just want the whole world to upgrade to Windows Vista? Not me – I am sticking with Windows XP which I will explain why in a future installment of “The Web Celt” along with my recommendation for a good, safe virus and security product for your computer!