Windows Live OneCare – Beta 2 – Finally Removed

geek — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 01:20:39 +0000

For those of you that haven’t heard the news, or braved the beta program, Microsoft’s Live OneCare beta 2 program is about done. After a variety of different frustrations – even when wanting Microsoft to have the single solution of OS and security – I have removed OneCare and resolved to go back to a combination of security tools that are less integrated and, in my opinion, work better. Whether they protect my system better or not is almost irrelevant – it’s making sure that my system feel buggy that is most important to me. OneCare didn’t offer that; with all the alerts I felt as though it was doing too little and I was doing too much.

One of the problems that I encountered during the removal had to do with the OneCare backup files. I couldn’t, by default in Windows Vista, remove them. I tried a variety of different things before stumbling on Laurent Duveau’s very elegant fix. Needless to say, it worked first time for me.

Problem: You reinstalled Live OneCare, or you start using v2 beta, and want to delete your old backup folder, but you can’t.

This is a permission problem, that maybe you can solve with cacls with command line:

cacls “:\” /t /g administrators:F

Sample:
cacls “F:\Windows OneCare Backup\YourComputerName” /t /g administrators:F
Do NOT put a \ at the end of the path.

You’ll get a message “Are you sure(Y/N)?”

This will strip the permissions from the folder and you should be able to delete it.

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Windows Live OneCare – Beta 2 – Finally Removed