Review by Grace

I first tried Bitdefender Antivirus 2010 and found it reasonably good… the definitions were extensive, but it slowed down my system at times. It seemed more stable then the previous antivirus programs I’ve used, so I went ahead and updated it to Bitdefender Internet Security 2010 after about two weeks of use. Worked the same for a while until I started really noticing the difference between these programs and my last antivirus program, Spyware Doctor.

When I first installed Bitdefender Antivirus 2010, it found a couple of problems that Spyware Doctor didn’t. However, since then it’s found almost nothing, which is strange… when I used Spyware Doctor, I would scan every night and find four or five minor problems (tracking cookies, etc) over the course of a week. This program hasn’t found anything in the last two months. I finally reinstalled Spyware Doctor and came up with several minor security risks that Bitdefender ignored. My definitions are automatically updated, so that isn’t the problem.

After about a month of using it, I began having strange problems. First, Bitdefender’s firewall suddenly began causing problems with programs that were normally allowed to access the internet. I tried removing them from the exceptions list then re-adding them, but nothing worked. I finally gave up and disabled Bitdefender’s firewall and everything worked fine again. I emailed their support, but never received a response.

Second, around the same time I began having computer lockups… my computer would stop responding and run EXTREMELY slow. At the same time, the Bitdefender icon in the taskbar would turn grey with the message telling me that Bitdefender encountered a problem and I need to restart the computer. It usually cleared itself up within a few minutes, but would reoccur randomly. Sometimes it would go several days, other times it would happen two to three times in a single evening. I finally had to shut down the real-time monitoring, which seems to have cured this problem.

Well, after shutting down the process scanning and the firewall, and not being happy with the daily system scanning, what’s left? Email scanning is flaky at best (will suddenly mark a single email in the middle of an entire conversation with a friend as ‘spam’), and it’s extremely slow (2-3x as long to check email). I also hate the fact that every time it finds a spam message it gives you a pop-up. I haven’t found a way to shut these off, but by now I’ve given up and have moved on. One of the worst antivirus programs I’ve ever used.