I got an e-mail last night saying that Windows Live OneCare 1.5 beta is available for download (note that this e-mail also said I could share this  information with anyone who might be interested, so I’m assuming you’re interested if you’re reading this).

This is great news for anyone running Windows Vista.  As I vented in a previous post, I have a OneCare subscription for my home computers, but was really frustrated when I found that I couldn’t install OneCare on the machine I upgraded to Vista RC1.  Vista build 5500 or above is now accepted for OneCare, though RC1 is recommended.

Other than the compatibility changes, there’s not much word of what else has changed in OneCare 1.5.  The e-mail did reference integration with the Phishing feature in Internet Explorer 7, so perhaps they have placed some of their emphasis on integration with the various IE7 security features.

A note about upgrading…  it looks like if you want to try OneCare 1.5 beta on a machine running the released version of OneCare, you have to uninstall version 1 and then install the beta.  Bummer that they couldn’t streamline that into an upgrade.

Another interesting note is that the download is actually an EXE — that should work much better than the ActiveX installation they use for the released version.  I didn’t have any trouble with the ActiveX installer, but it seems that it could pose a problem for people with additional 3rd-party security software on their computers.

Download Windows Live OneCare 1.5 beta