Forget when you last tuned up your PC? Sometimes we do, too, even here at the Windows Live OneCare safety scanner ranch. But now it doesn’t matter, because the latest version of the Windows Live Toolbar will tell you. You can look to the PC health icon to let you know whether it’s time to run a full-service scan on your computer and to warn you when you’ve surfed to a suspicious Web site that might be phishing for your personal information.

Windows Live OneCare Advisor reminds you, by way of a little yellow shield icon, to run a full-service scan every 30 days to check for viruses, spyware, and other potentially unwanted software and to improve your computer’s performance by getting rid of junk on your hard disk.

But you don’t have to wait 30 days—OneCare Advisor is poised on your Toolbar, ready to give you access to the safety scanner any time you’re worried about exposure to viruses or spyware or if you just feel like your computer is slower than it ought to be.

Alas, while the safety scanner can evaluate the current health status of your computer and fix immediate issues, it can’t protect your computer from threats or problems between scans. For always-on security and regular, automatic PC maintenance, check out Windows Live OneCare, the new PC health service from Microsoft. They’re running a 90-day free trial right now!

We’ve received several posts lately from concerned users who don’t know if their computers are infected or not by malware or spyware. The confusion seems to come from the scanner informing the user during the process of the scan that something has been detected. However, once the scan completes, the user is shown that nothing has been found on their system. So you’re asking, what’s the deal with that?

Well, this is brought about by some complexities in how we identify detections. Before we dive into the real issue, how about a few definitions…

latent detection – a potential detection on the machine that, by itself, is not enough to identify the machine as ‘infected’; eg. a file commonly associated with spyware is found on the system: think of something like spy.log being located

concrete detection – a positive detection on the machine; which by itself provides ‘concrete’ evidence to know the machine is ‘infected’

So, what is currently happening within the scanner is that we are seeing ‘latent’ detections on the system and immediately alerting you that they are there. However, when we get to the end of the scan, not enough items have been identified to come up with a ‘concrete’ detection. Because of this, we then state that nothing has been found.

We are currently working on getting this resolved for you in an upcoming release - but until then, there is no need to worry. Latent threats are not viewed as harmful to your machine - but rather could be remnants of something that was previously on your machine (but is no longer present). That means that the 'concrete' (or dangerous) part has already been removed - so sleep easy tonight :)

Look for an update to this in the near future!

-Bo Rohlfsen
Program Manager - Windows Live Safety Center

Thank you all for taking time to check out our scanner! Since we launched on November 1, we have gotten an enormous amount of feedback requesting that we support the new version of Internet Explorer, IE7 Beta 1 on Windows XP – so, here you go! :) We really have been listening to each of you - and it is your input that is helping us to make this a great product - so keep it coming!

Alongside this, we’ve also heard from you that you’d like to be able to customize your virus scan – so guess what? Yep, you can now select just where you want to scan for viruses on your system! It’s easy – check it out!

Click on the Full Service Scan button on the homepage…

From there, the scanner will install and load up – now click on Customize to get into some more details…

Alright – almost there! Now, click on the radio button for Customized scan listed under the Protection heading and click Next…

Now choose where you want to scan and click Next to start the scan!

We'd also like to let you know that we've been working on fixing some of the issues that you've previously seen in the beta - and many of them are now fixed and ready to go! So, check out the scanner again and let us know what you think!

Have you experienced issues when trying to install the scanner? If you’ve exhausted all the troubleshooting steps we have on the website and come up empty, it may be because you are running low on free hard disk space. So just what can you do about that?

There are two main solutions that could help you free up some disk space so that you can run the scanner.

The first option is to run the Disk Cleanup utility that comes with Windows and see if you can free up any space. To start Disk Cleanup, click Start and then click Run…. In the text box, type cleanmgr.exe which will launch the utility. If you’re asked to select a drive, choose the drive that Windows is installed on, which is usually the C:\ drive). After the utility has checked your computer, you’ll see a list of files that you can delete on your system. You can either go with the default selections or customize it to only delete what you want to delete. When you’re finished, click OK and the files will be deleted.

The second option is to remove programs from your computer that you no longer use. To do this, click Start, click Control Panel, and then double click Add or Remove Programs. Scroll through the list of programs and locate the ones that you’ve previously installed but no longer use or need. Click on each item that you wish to remove and then click Remove to uninstall it.

These two solutions should help you free up some space and get you running the scanner!

Hey everyone – this is Lara, member of the Program Management team for Windows Live Safety Center. The team is really excited about our beta release this week!  I’m hoping we have a lot of home users visit our site and use our scanner, and of course give us feedback on what they like in the scanner or what else they would like to see added. I know I will be asking my friends and family to scan their PCs.  We’ll be adding more to our site and scanner over the next few months, so stay tuned…