Review by Jacob and Kiki Hantla

UPDATE: The subscription suddenly expired about a year and a half prematurely, and technical support has proven to be unhelpful. I withdraw any recommendation for this product on that basis. I will have to uninstall and purchase and install a new antivirus software.n________nOld review: I have run only Norton antivirus products for the past 14 years, so I was hesitant but excited to compare Bitdefender when given the opportunity. My grandparents’ computer was the perfect test subject. Comparisons are with Norton Internet Security 2008 which was previously loaded on the computer:nnBit defender installed easily without any problems, unlike many other reviewers’ experiences. Make sure you have completely uninstalled all other antivirus software packages before installing bitdefender in order to avoid problems.

The program make little or no noticeable impact that I can discern on the speed of the computer while running in the background. However, I did not really have any issues with speed running Norton either. The complete scan seems to take longer than Norton to run.

Bitdefender seems to be a little easier for to customize, which is saying a lot since I am obviously familiar with Symantec configurations and was able to customize bitdefender’s options with ease; very intuitive. If you have no desire or ability to autoconfigure; the default settings are load without asking a lot of confusion questions and seem to be appropriate for the average user.

The ultimate test for an Antivirus/firewall package is whether or not it protects against viruses and doesn’t misidentify things that aren’t viruses. I have never had a virus on any computer that I have had running an up-to-date Symantec product. It’s hard to judge Bitdefender on this criteria by simply installing it. However, as I look at independent laboratory’s assessments of the product, it fails to get 100% marks that characterize most of the other major Internet Security/Antivirus packages, whereas Symantec products regularly get 100% of viruses facing it. Generally, Bitdefender failed by misidentifying things as viruses which were not in the tests that I read.

Based on the laboratory tests and my past success with Symantec, I will be keeping Norton on my personal computers but will probably recommend Bitdefender as a low-cost alternative for family members who are at low virus risk.