A Microsoft Safety Package. Grit Your Teeth.

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Microsoft's OneCare software updates its own database of viruses daily.

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KEEPING Windows free from viruses, spyware and other nastiness is a chronic headache. These days, the price of security software is just a cost of doing business on Windows PC's. (No e-mail from smug, virus-free Mac fans, please. Not everyone has a choice.)

So you might be surprised to find out who just entered the antivirus and anti-spyware market this month: Microsoft. Yes, Microsoft, the company whose inattention to security made antivirus software a necessity in the first place.

What's next - Häagen-Dazs diet pills?

This business plan sticks in a lot of craws. Why should Microsoft profit from the plague of viruses and spyware? Shouldn't it have designed Windows better to begin with? And if it has indeed found a way to protect Windows, isn't it a tad exploitative to charge for it?

Microsoft has no convincing answer for these questions, except to point out that it is addressing Windows' vulnerability - in the next version, called Windows Vista.

If you're bothered by Microsoft's attempt to sell you twice - once on a vulnerable operating system, once on a fix - then you'll be forgiven for passing on the new service, called Windows Live OneCare.

But if you can get past that philosophical hurdle, you may be pleasantly surprised. For its target market of nontechnical people, OneCare turns out to be quite good.

The service costs a year, which, remarkably, covers up to three computers. You can download the software portion from onecare.com, or buy it in a box from a computer store.

OneCare is designed to automate five areas of PC life:

VIRUS PROTECTION According to Microsoft's market research, 80 percent of Windows users believe that they have up-to-date antivirus software - but in fact, only 33 percent do.

Like rival antivirus programs, OneCare constantly watches over your PC for the arrival of new viruses. When it spots one in a document (that you open in an e-mail message, for example), it quarantines the file in a protected folder where it can do no harm. It alerts you to the problem and offers to try a cleanup of the document.

OneCare updates its own database of viruses daily. (Microsoft says it belongs to the same virus information-sharing cooperative as Symantec, McAfee and other antivirus companies.) The final version of OneCare caught 100 percent of "in the wild" viruses in testing by Virus Bulletin.

SPYWARE Similarly, OneCare also detects and offers to remove spyware - programs that are designed to display pop-up ads, change your Internet settings, transmit information behind your back and so on.

Spyware protection is a nice feature to have, although not worth paying for; behind the scenes, it's just Windows Defender, a free Microsoft program. It may also be OneCare's weakest feature; in PC Magazine tests, OneCare missed a quarter of its 24 spyware programs. (Microsoft calls the magazine's test method "unfair," pointing out that the particular spyware programs tested were extremely rare and obscure. The company also points out that Windows Defender itself is still in beta testing, and will steadily improve.)

BACKUP Let's face it: backing up is a pain. Even if you've gone to the trouble of buying a backup hard drive, remembering to back up your data and bothering to do it routinely is a hassle. (Windows XP Home Edition comes with a backup program, but you have to install it manually, and it's painfully crude.) No wonder that, according to Microsoft's research, 9 out of 10 PC owners don't regularly back up their files.

OneCare can perform either complete or incremental backups (a faster method that copies only files that are new or changed since the last backup) - automatically, unattended, on a regular schedule. Alas, this stunt requires an external U.S.B. hard drive; flash drives, internal drives, FireWire drives and network drives need not apply.

You can also back up onto blank CD's or DVD's, although that, of course, is not something OneCare can do unattended. You have to sit there and feed it blanks.

If tragedy should befall your hard drive, OneCare's Restore function reverses the procedure.

UPDATES Windows XP already auto-downloads Microsoft security patches, but OneCare also auto-downloads patches for other Microsoft programs. The day you install it, you may be startled to see how many security fixes for Microsoft Office you've missed.

TUNEUP Either on command or on a schedule, OneCare gives your computer a tuneup. It defragments your hard drive (reconstitutes files that have been subdivided on the hard-drive surface for faster access), deletes temporary files and other detritus (to reclaim disk space), runs a virus scan, checks for Microsoft updates and backs up your stuff.

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E-mail: Pogue@nytimes.com

Correction: July 4, 2006

The David Pogue column in Business Day on Thursday, about a Microsoft antivirus program called Windows Live OneCare, included an erroneous reference, based on information from the company, about one feature. While Microsoft is considering adding a feature tracking a computer's startup time, it has not done so in the current version.