Review by J

Installation was simple. During the setup you can configure settings for home network, firewall, and parental control. Choices are clear and you can change your selections later if you decide. You also get the opportunity to decide between simple and advanced interfaces. The advanced interface offers more configuration options which will likely be needed later if you plan to utilize the full features. Updating took a little while when I installed from disk. It also required several reboots. You can save initial setup time by downloading the latest version from Bitdefender’s web site and using the key provided with purchased copy. The program offered the option to scan for viruses after install. Scanning was pretty quick. Deep scan took ¹⁄₂ hour,quick scan took 7 ¹⁄₂ minutes. Detailed log files are created of the results. System impact seems minimal with real-time scanning enabled. There is also a laptop/gaming mode that will further reduce background processes and resource consumption when gaming or on a laptop. The firewall seemed a little paranoid initially as I received pop-up firewall warnings the first time I started my web browser and any web dependent programs. I had to grant access for a component of IE and Maplestory, however Unreal Tournament and iTunes were automatically configured. Casual users might be intimidated by some of the initial warnings, especially if they have to choose whether or not to grant access. However, a glance at the warning box can usually determine if the program is legitimate or not. I also received pop-up warnings when attempting to install a program from CD-ROM. There is no easy way to temporarily disable real-time protection for software installations or other tasks that the AV might interfere with. There’s no right-click option to pause or disable from the taskbar icon. Even after opening the program and manually disabling all protection options, the program still appeared to be running in the background. Parental controls were not very reliable initially. Despite selecting the Teenager setting during setup, I was still able to access inappropriate sites. After fiddling with the settings, I discovered I had to set it to Heuristic mode to automatically block inappropriate sites. Once I did this, inappropriate sites were blocked, however, I was also unable to reach some safe sites that had advertising. I added a site to the white list, however it continued to block links within the site. I eventually disabled the Heuristic mode out of frustration. I felt it was too much of an all or nothing approach. The phishing filter seems on par with most of the others out there.

Overall, although I feel the predefined rules for the firewall and parental controls could be better, the program is otherwise solid and offers extensive options to fine-tune protection. They may want to tweak the parental control in future updates as I honestly doubt a user would be patient enough to manually add sites and the links within to the white list on a frequent basis.