We’ve been recommending and selling BitDefender Antivirus for some time now, but we’ve found it has its quirks.
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.