Review by A. H.

In the past fifteen years or so, I’ve had experience with Norton, McAfee, ZoneLabs, and Kaspersky anti-virus and security software. Bitdefender ranks right up there among the least problematic security suites I’ve come across.

I’ve had McAfee products that brought my computer to its knees and ZoneLabs products that interfered terribly with Internet browsing. I haven’t noticed any glitches so far with Bitdefender 2010. It’s the most transparent suite I’ve used.

I installed this software on a Pentium 4 HT with 2gb RAM that runs WinXP Pro. Firefox still clips along, and the antivirus engine does a pretty quick job of working through the nearly 400gbs of files I’ve got on the 500gb hard drive.

There are many customizable options in the Bitdefender interface. None of it is confusing, but there are a lot of options. The software operates simply, though. It doesn’t throw numerous alerts at you every time you do something on the PC. It knows which new programs to trust (whitelisting?) and allows them access through the firewall. I haven’t had a problem with malware on this machine. It seems to be doing just fine.

In all, this is a worthy contender. I rate it right up there with Kaspersky 2010, my other favorite suite at the moment. It doesn’t hog system resources the way other suites do, and it doesn’t get in the way. But it does its job. What more can you ask for?