Have you checked out Windows Live OneCare, the latest service offering from Microsoft? If not, give it a try.Won’t cost you a dime because Microsoft has a 90 days no charge trial, which should give you enough time to make up your mind. If you decide to keep it, the service costs about 50 dollars per year, for up to three PCs or laptops.First things first: What exactly is OneCare? It’s a monster combo that promises protection from viruses and spyware and includes also a two- way firewall. In addition, OneCare will automatically do backups for you and will tune up your system for performance, all in one package that’s supposed to update itself automatically. Obviously that automatic backup part captured my attention, but to be quite frank I was also getting tired of installing and maintaining separate firewall, spyware and virus protection applications on my machines.I had tried in the past other combos, for example Zonelabs’ ZoneAlarm Pro but was not too happy with what they offered.So, care to know what are my first impressions after one day or two of using OneCare? So far so good, but with some disappointments. Starting from the good, OneCare does a good job installing itself smoothly and keeping a low profile on my machines. That’s good! I don’t want any primadonna application getting in the way when I am working, like now.Also good: The firewall inside OneCare is smarter than others. For example, when I launched Outlook for the first time I did not have to set a firewall rule: OneCare recognized that application and opened a discrete message informing that Outlook had been allowed to access the Internet.The same happened when I launched Internet Explorer and Firefox. However, if the application is not recognized OneCare will show a message such as this View image and wait for instructions. Cool! I did not use OneCare long enough to say anything one way or the other about spyware or virus protection, but you may want to check what Roger Grimes recently had to say about OneCare and the MS-Word bug.Another thing I like? Full disk scan and other possibly long and disruptive tasks such as tune ups (disk cleanup and defrag, for example) can be scheduled to run off the prime time.Same for backups, but that’s where my disappointment with OneCare is. Unfortunately someone in the OneCare team (or whatever the project name was) decided that storing backups on internal disk drive was unacceptable. So here I am with a 500GB SATA drive that I use only for backups, and OneCare doesn’t let me write backups to it. To add insult to injury, the backup application added the content of that SATA drive to the stuff in need of backup, estimating that everything would fit in just 51 CDs. Obviously I canceled that job.Wait, there is more. OneCare rejects also network drives as backup targets, so mapping a drive from one of the servers in my lab wasn’t an option either. Also impossible was using one of my NetGear SC101 because they appear as internally mounted drives. Apparently, OneCare doesn’t know or doesn’t care that you can set those devices hundreds of feet away from the computer.What can you use as backup target with OneCare? CDs and DVDs plus external drives, which in this peculiar view of the world means drives over an USB or Firewire connection. I didn’t have handy an eSATA drive to see if that works too. Did Microsoft hear from me about this? You bet! From a polite next-day e-mail message I learned that ” …the Product Group is considering adding this feature [backup to network drives and to non-OS internal drives] into Windows Live OneCare in a later version because they have received many similar feedback…”.Geesh! Why am I not surprised? Perhaps because many home users have their own peer network? Or because many are smart enough to install a second drive or to custom order a PC with two drives?Not to mention corporate users doing a backup of their laptops on their network share, from where eventually it will be included in the company data protection cycles. For now, as backup target for my laptop I am using a cute 2.5″ 60 GB USB Store-It Drive from Pexagon Technology. It’s small enough to take with me on the road and Pexagon has engraved my name and phone number on the case (will do the same for any customer), which should make it easier to find it if it gets lost (or may be not if the people who find it don’t like you).Even though the backup is a partial disappointment, I am otherwise “first impression” happy with OneCare. I have only one throat to choke now to keep my PCs healthy and protected, and judging from the first few days I should spend less of my time baby-sitting computers, be they mine or not.For example, I can check how everything is going on just one screen View image instead of squinting over 3 or 4 different applications. When (if?) the “Product Group” unleashes network and internal drive backups I have another suggestion for them, continuous backups. Anyway, I’ll wait. I learned long time ago to never ask developers more than one thing at a time.