Digital Home Thoughts: Windows Consumer Experience Event in New York City

Windows Live OneCare 2.0 and Vista Parental Controls
The next segment of the presentation was something that was less interesting to me personally, but for many people it would be: OneCare 2.0 will protect three computers with anti-virus, anti-spyware, and anti-phishing protection for $49 USD per year. That's great pricing: I've always been amazed at how expensive the Norton packages are, especially if there are multiple computers involved. Microsoft really moved the bar for multi-computer households. Now if they could just figure out the same thing is needed when their operating systems... ;-)

OneCare 2.0 does a few other cool things: it recognizes if your WiFi network isn't secure and will help to fix it, will configure printer sharing, will do complete system backups to a network drive (which even Vista Ultimate will not do) and Online Photo Backup. That last one caught my attention. I dug into it online after the fact (as I'm writing this) and discovered that it's a feature that's in beta but is due out soon. This video gives a good overview, but the basics are that you get 10 GB of storage and you can backup photos on any of the up to three PCs that you have OneCare installed on. 10 GB is a decent amount, although if you have more than that I'd suggest Carbonite [affiliate] as a solution because they offer unlimited backups for not only your photos, but all your other data as well.

Parental controls are something I have no use for yet, as I don't have children, but I'm convinced I'll appreciate them a great deal a few years from now. What's new here is the Windows Live Web Filter: it replaces what comes in Vista today, and what it allows you to do as a parent is to log into your account remotely and approve or disallow Websites for your child. That's pretty cool when you think about it: if you're a parent, working late, and your child IM's you saying he needs access to a certain Website for a school project, you can grant him access to that site remotely. It also allows you to control your child's Windows Live Messenger contact list, a helpful method for keeping online predators from getting too close.

The last part of this segment was a short discussion about Games for Windows. This is Microsoft's branded effort toward making games on the Windows platform less mysterious when it comes to system requirements, parental ratings, and installation and functionality in the operating system. This was a pure re-hash, nothing new was presented.