For a while now, Microsoft stopped selling new licences for the consumer anti virus software Windows Live One Care. You can get all the details on this over on the Team Blog. In the next few days my extended subscription is due to end.

I’ve been using Windows Live One Care since the beta and I’ve never had any problems with it. In fact, I feel I’ve had fewer issues with this than I’ve had with any other Anti Virus products I’ve used in the past.

One of the things I really liked about One Care was that the one licence would cover up to 3 machines. So you could protect your machine, the family machine and perhaps a grandparents machine.

One Care is pretty basic and that was all I needed. But it would let you create a family circle covering as many machines as you had licences for. This would let you keep an eye on the other computers letting you see if one or more machines were needing attention in the form of updates, overdue virus scans or “tune ups”. You also had control over the backup process on each machine which would be a great where you had something like a NAS on your network.

Now that my subscription is due to expire, I need to decide on a replacement. The obvious choice is Microsoft's latest consumer anti virus product, Security Essentials. While this is a free, the product detail on the website is a bit limited. I’m going to have to take some time this weekend to find out more information about Security Essentials and the other competing products.