BitDefender Internet Security 2008 - 2 Years/3 Pc's

When I bought this about 6 months ago, I was trying to find something to replace my CA Internet Security because I was unhappy with its performance.

This product is great when it comes to protecting my computer. It found viruses that my old software NEVER did. It has blocked multiple attempts on my PC, and I have had minimal problems with it.

My biggest complaint is that it seems to slow my PC down a bit. However not as bad as others I have used (i.e. Panda, Norton, MacAfee - Don't even waste your money on MacAfee - But that's a different story).

It also takes a longer time to scan the PC, but I like the deep system scan becuase it really finds things that can get into your computer.

I have recommended this product to many ppl, and being in the computer industry for many years, it seems to be one of the best I have come across

First of all, let me say that I really think this is a good product. The interface is clean, its antivirus is top notch and so is the firewall.

BitDefender detected trojans other security suites missed. Even though I'm still unsure about whether they were false positives, I'd rather err on the side of caution.

From all the security suites I have used, this is the only one that shows me the network traffic being used per process. Just think of a process manager like the one you get on CTRL+ALT+DEL but with each record showing the Kbps, I like that. Maybe the other suites have it as well but if they do, they don't make it really accessible.

With that said, I did have some minor issues with it:

I have BitDefender on 2 machines, one of them with XP and one with Vista. The latter is having problems waking up from standby mode. This problem started after I installed BitDefender and stops if I uninstall it. I have looked around for a solution but nothing so far.

The other issues are not really issues but only annoyances, like for example: I have a second network adapter on my machine. Sometimes I like to disable this adapter to get my machine off that network and when I do that, BitDefender makes me specify all the firewall rules again. All the program rules that specify whether a program gets network access or not have to be entered in both places.

Finally, it's a little slow to start sometimes and the OS keeps warning you there's no antivirus on your machine until BitDefender finally starts.

Overall I like the product, but I still have a valid subscription for a different security suite that expires in three months. Whether I switch to BitDefender at that time or not is yet to be seen.

I bought this product to protect an older Windows XP PC (5 years old), and a new 64-bit Windows XP (2002 SP2) laptop. Installation was flawless on both machines. I expected to have to download a 64-bit update of BitDefender "by hand" from the author's web site, but the software on the CD that I received worked w/o any problems, and without any manual work on my part. An initial scan ran fine on both machines found a few infected files which I quarantined as directed by BitDefender. I did not need to invest my time to figure-out how to deal with the errant files. BitDefender did a nice job.
The only downside I've noticed is that the overall performance of both machines is slower due to BitDefender's monitoring of reading and writing files on the disk. I like having an easy way to turn this monitoring on and off, but I'd rather get the benefit w/o any slowdown (but this may be just an unreasonable wish).

I downloaded and installed (well sort of) the trial version. When the system rebooted, the firewall, av, and most other services were disabled. When I attempted to reenable them, nothing happened. Tried to reinstall - same issue. They really need to work on testing their solution on more platforms. I am running a Dell XPS Gen2 2GB RAM, Centrino (single core) 2Ghz with WinXP Pro sp3. I too received a few notices about the product not passing Windows Logo certification. This is really unacceptable for a product to be offered with this many issues. I did not attempt tech support, when I have this many problems on what should be a SIMPLE install, it means they did very little QA/UAT on their product pre-release and their help desk will be SWAMPED. Insult to injury, they leave quite a few registry entries behind on uninstall as well as their nag folder in program files (then again what should you expect). Glad I am not out any money. I have liked Zone Alarm Sec Suite but it is getting too CPU intensive/slow boots. I am doing the reverse of another post I am going with NOD32 (very lightweight AV) and Comodo Pro v3 Firewall (free).

This software suite is quite problematic. The initial install on my Win XP SP3 system went very poorly. Their central system was down and Bitdefender couldn't communicate with it when it needed to during install (for updates and registering). For this and other reasons, the result was problems with Outlook caused by Bitdefender's anti-spam module's interface with it. Outlook would not come up at times and I'd have to reboot to get it to work. The XP shutdown was quite bizarre, indicating that many modules were not shutting down properly.

What was really surprising was that it allowed the XP firewall to remain on. It didn't even tell me to turn it off, either.

Tech support via chat was useless as they couldn't quite understand my questions, but support by email was better. They wanted me to run some diagnostics available on their website and send the results to them. Their reply was quick and they recommended uninstalling and reinstalling with a special uninstaller and reinstaller also available on their website. After doing so, Outlook worked ok but my registry had many errors. Fixing the registry with Registry Mechanic caused Bitdefender to stop working completely, so I went through the uninstall and reinstall again. The registry was ok this time, and as of this writing Bitdefender is still working, but for how long I don't know.

Operationally, you don't know there's any behind-the-scenes problems such as it's firewall or real-time protection being off due to some sort of failure. Usually, the tool tray icon on the lower right of your screen would flash or display an exclamation point or something. So, I have to keep double-clicking on the tool tray icon to see if everything is still working.

Internet security software is the most problematic of all software, so I guess they can be forgiven for all of this. It appears that they are trying, though. Eventually I think they'll work the bugs out.