By the time we started selling and recommending this product they came out with a new version 2009. What a nightmare! We have given numerous refunds and sent the balance of our BitDefender 2009 stock back to the distributor for a credit. For now we highly recommend that you avoid upgrading from BitDefender AV 2008 to the disastrous 2009 version.

It has mail sending issues with Microsoft Outlook where outgoing mail with attachments will stay in the outbox and continue to send over and over again. It never removes completely when you perform an uninstall, you have to download the Bitdefender uninstall tool or Windows Security Center will continue to tell you Bitdefender is not functioning properly. There is a noticeable performance decrease over version 2008 and plenty of issues where it just reports that it is not functioning or it won’t update. It also has an issue where Vista doesn’t recognize it as a valid antispyware application.

We were lucky that we had started testing AVG Network Edition for our business clients and since the release of AVG 8 it has proved to be an exceptional antivirus and antispyware application. For personal use you can’t really beat the free AVG antivirus since version 8 was released. For our business clients AVG Network Edition is very impressive with a minimal footprint and the remote administration utility is, in my opinion, superior and much easier to use than the equivalent Computer Associates remote administration application. Now AVG 8.5 has been released and you can imagine my hesitation to adopt an upgrade to a product we have just started selling and recommending after the nightmare that was BitDefender 2009. Good news! AVG 8.5 is working just as well as version 8 and it has some new antispyware features that should help prevent future spyware methods of infection. AVG continues to focus on minimal use of resources. We love Malwarebytes for spyware removal and we are excited that we have actually seen AVG 8.5 find some items that Malwarebytes had missed.

So, why did we quit using CA Antivirus? Well, mainly because it was an antivirus only. We would get customers complaining when they would get infected with spyware and we constantly found ourselves explaining that it wasn’t an antispyware application and that Windows Defender was the product that they were using that did not stop the spyware infection. We could not argue that CA AV did not stop the malware though. We do believe that in today’s security environment an antivirus program should be antimalware and include prevention and cure for both virus and spyware types of malware. Computer Associates wants you to pay extra for spyware protection. Their offering still seems to be the core application that was Pest Patrol. We were never impressed with Pest Patrol’s cleaning ability, its use of resources, or the user interface.

If you are infected with malware we highly recommend that you remove the product(s) that failed you, install AVG 8.5 and then install, update and scan your computer with Malwarebytes. Happy cleaning!

Recently we’ve been getting some fairly widespread complaints about sending and receiving multiple duplicate emails. It wasn’t long before we determined that everybody that was sending out duplicates was a customer using BitDefender 2009! The culprit? The outgoing email scanner. Evidently, the scanner would hold up the email client, and the client would simply try sending the message again until it went through. An outgoing email scanner isn’t especially important, considering you must already be infected if you’re sending infected files. So off it went; one by one customers disabled the outgoing email scanner, and one-by-one customers stopped sending duplicate emails.

Despite being an excellent antivirus and antispyware, that’s not the only setting we’ve found to be better off disabled. Identity control has caused some problems as well, as it gets overzealous with blocking changes the registry without even giving the user a choice. I’ve seen Windows service packs fail to install because BitDefender blocked necessary registry changes. The downside of this is that such registry control is sure to reduce your chance of getting infected with spyware, but breaking Windows is a rather unwanted side effect. So off it goes.

Automatic game mode, while good in theory, is somewhat obnoxious as well. “Game mode” in BitDefender disables all BitDefender popups and alerts, and sets BitDefender real-time protection level to “permissive”. When running games in full-screen mode, this will prevent BitDefender popping up and taking focus away from the game, which, as a gamer, I know is very annoying. The problem with automatic game mode is that it detects all full-screen applications, including screen savers, as a game and prompts you to add it to the automatic game mode list. So off it goes.

BitDefender also includes an automatic anti-phishing add-on for web browsers, but so does Internet Explorer 7. Being a browser add-on, it can slow down the browser, and as it scans every page you visit, it slows down your web browsing. So off it goes.

With these configuration changes, BitDefender should run smoothly and problem-free.

While I’m on the subject, I haven’t yet made any ground on getting Windows Vista’s Security Center to recognize BitDefender’s anti-spyware component. Bummer!

update: BitDefender 2009 is not recommended.

For instance, it’s interesting what nonsensical things you’ll see and learn when you install a single piece of software day after day on so many different machines. Take BitDefender Antivirus for example. Setting up four brand new computers yesterday, all of which received a trial version of BitDefender, there was a little oddity. On two of the four, upon installing and configuring the antivirus and a quick reboot later; hark! What do mine eyes see but Windows Security Center has a little beef with me!

“Your antispyware is turned off” said the little balloon upon my system tray. BitDefender itself said no such thing, but Windows Security Center obviously didn’t give a hoot. To tell Security Center to attempt to enable my antispyware was an exercise in futility, as it said “ne’er shall I do such a thing, my good man, for I do not trust this software!”

That is, of course, a paraphrase, but the notion is the same. In the past, CA Antivirus has given me somewhat similar problems (that is, occasionally refusing to run properly when first installed) which a simple reinstall corrected, so a possible solution quickly presented itself in this case. A reinstall of BitDefender rectified the situation easily.

So what caused this mishap in only two of the four computers? Practically impossible to say. The two on which the problem occurred were a different brand from the two that it did not, meaning hardware differences as well as preinstallation packages. Two of them were running Windows Vista; the other two, XP. The two with the problem were preinstalled with an older version of a McAfee trial package, and McAfee has been well known to leave a little keepsake behind when uninstalled, so perhaps a conflict remained that simply uninstalling the malfunctioning instance of BitDefender rectified, allowing a new installation to integrate cleanly.

Regardless, I believe that we as mortals may never understand these things called computers, as hard as we try.

UPDATE: As it turns out, I was premature in posting about this. The next day after writing this entry, I rebooted the computers and discovered that my problem was not solved. Windows Security Center apparently just decided to stop bugging me about it.

In the end, it seems that Vista just doesn’t recognize BitDefender 2009′s antispyware module as “safe”. Disabling monitoring of your antispyware software, though not the optimal solution, seems to work. If at some point I find a solution to this or it just starts liking BitDefender 2009, I’ll be sure to post about it!