The [tag]Windows Live Safety Center[/tag] beta has now launched and is ready for use.

[tag]Windows[/tag] Live Safety Center is a new free service form [tag]Microsoft[/tag] designed to help you keep your PC healthy by carrying out the following operations.

• Check for and remove viruses
• Learn about threats
• Improve your PC's performance
• Get rid of junk on your hard disk

Here's how it works.

First, you visit Microsoft Live Safety Center and click on Full Service Scan button..

The site then asks for permission to install the scanner onto your PC through the browser.

Internet Explorer 6 under [tag]Windows XP[/tag] with [tag]SP2[/tag] installed will probably block this and ask you to confirm installation.  Instructions are given on how to do this.  You can safely do this because you are on the Microsoft site and have asked for the scanner to be installed.

Another safety warning will appear to confirm installation of the scanner.  Click Install to continue.

Once the scanner is installed you can launch it by clicking on Launch Scanner.

Which do you want?  Quick scan or a complete scan.  It's best to do a complete scan unless you are short on time.

The scanning process will now begin.

The process takes a while but it's pretty thorough.

The process is pretty CPU intensive so don't expect to be able to do too much with your PC while the scanning is in progress (to be honest this is true of all such scanners).

Nearly done!

Done!  Nothing much on my system, just a few temporary files and a little defragmentation.  No [tag]viruses[/tag] and no [tag]open ports[/tag].

Windows Live Safety Center now fixing the system ...

Some fixing done ...

Job done!

Impressions

All in all, I'm pretty impressed with the service offered by Windows Live Safety Center - it's definitely aimed at the home user (power users would want more stats and to see what's going on!) and it seems to cover all the bases when it comes to [tag]PC[/tag] health.  It's simple to use and needs the minimal of user input which is just what most users want.

Give it a go - when it comes to security tools I always say that it's better to cover more bases and use more than one tool in case one misses something important.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 2nd, 2005 at 11:08 and is filed under PC Doctor's Useful Links, Stay Secure, Tweaks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.