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September 22, 2005
A cautionary tale
Bleeding Edge can tell you, indeed over the years we've told you many times, that it's generally not a good idea to buy and install new software.
If you were thinking of installing BitDefender Internet Security, which promises to provide home and small office users with firewall, anti-virus, anti-spam and anti-phishing and parental control, you might be interested in the e-mail we've just received from a reader:
We recently purchased two licences for the newly released BitDefender 9 Internet Security product.
We have discovered faults in the product which I will outline below.
Prior to purchase, we researched the internet on reviews of antivirus / spam / spyware (etc) software. The product that in aggregate rankings came out best was BitDefender. The Publisher, Softwin SRL is based in Romania with branches in US, UK and Europe. (According to their documentation the company was founded in/around 1990 and now has around 500 employees).
BitDefender 9 IS is a brand new release, and we were probably one of the first people in the world to acquire it, which we did on/about 14 September.
Our system:
Pentium 4/512 MB RAM/80 GB hard Disk/Lite-On CD-RW drive.
We reformatted the hard disk NTFS and loaded a new version of Windows XP SP-2.
We then loaded BitDefender 9 Internet Security. No other software loaded.
Prior to loading Bit Defender, the system worked perfectly. After we loaded Bit Defender:
a) The CD - RW drive was disabled.
b) When we opened Windows Explorer and clicked on "CD-RW D" drive, the system just froze(an hour-glass appeared). We were unable to break out of this freeze. The system would not respond to "cntrl-alt-del". The system would not respond to "shut down" command. The only way we could get out of this was to pull the power cord on the computer.
When we uninstalled BitDefender, the system again worked perfectly. When we re-installed it, the faults again appeared.
We contacted BitDefender support. They were very responsive. After some dialogue, they acknowledged that they too could reproduce the problem and their engineers were working on it. This was about three days ago. So far they have not come up with a fix.
I have now contacted the CEO of the Australian Distributor (Netfreighters) and indicated that in my view, they were selling "Faultware" and the product should be suspended from sales until it can be re-engineered to address the above issues. (No reply as yet).
Overall, because of its history and reputation, and the good tech support, I still have confidence in the BitDefender range. I just think they have gone to market a bit green on this release, and need to make the product more stable. I am hoping that this will happen soon.
Posted by cw at September 22, 2005 09:18 AM
Comments
Seems to be some thruth in the message.
I've purchased a brand new HP nx8220, and installed a lot of things from scratch. I decided, that using an antivirus from scratch, was probably no bad idea.
BitDefender had gotten some good reviews in trusted media in the past, so... what the heck. I bought 2 licenses of version 9.0 standard anti-virus (I have a large firewall).
Shouldn't have, though. After I installed HP's Bluetooth, everytime I clicked on the Bluetooth Icon in the task bar (and a few other places too), the BitDefender came up with a scanning report telling me, that there were no problems with the ini-file in the Bluetooth directory.
I tried excluding the directory.
I tried excluding files with the ini-extension.
I tried to disable BitDefender.
I even selected Exit on BitDefender.
To no avail. Whenever I clicked the Bluetooth icon, BitDefender told me, that the ini-file was OK. And the standard Bluetooth "display" did never turn up.
Hmmmm...
Maybe I should format the disk, and reinstall everything in order to defend against the side effects from BitDefender 9.
Eeven if it has been de-installed, it's virtually impossible to know, whether the performed installations were successfull, damaged or just sligtly "chipped".
Sigh....
I dis not expect anti-virus companies to be that huge a danger to your security (I've had really bad experiences with the slow virus-signature updates from Symantec, so they're also out... ;-)
Regards
Kurt
Posted by: Kfriis at November 14, 2005 05:51 AM