BitDefender Review

Waste time, money and energy with BitDefender Internet Security 2010

I don't normally write software reviews on my home energy efficiency website. But I feel compelled to write a BitDefender review today. After 10 months using BitDefender Internet Security 2010 on my Lenovo Thinkpad, I have finally removed all traces of it from my system (not without some difficulty) and purchased Norton Antivirus 2011 instead. What a relief!

First, why do I feel compelled to write a BitDefender review? Three reasons:

• Searching for "BitDefender review" when I was considering buying this product led me to a number of pages that described BitDefender Internet Security 2010 in glowing terms. Of course, most of these pages included links to buy a copy of BitDefender because they make a commission on sales. Talk about bias! I want to help others not fall into this trap.
• My BitDefender experience has been an extremely challenging and unpleasant one. I want to save others the pain!
• Since energy efficiency is one of my passions, and since BitDefender wasted a lot of CPU resources on my laptop over the ten months I used it, I want to help others avoid a product that will increase their computer's energy usage without providing a benefit.

Let's look at the good, the bad, and the ugly of BitDefender.

BitDefender: the good

BitDefender has built up a reputation as providing very fast antivirus and Internet security protection over the years. If you read any BitDefender review on the web, or read through the BitDefender forums, you'll find a lot of praise for BD 2009 and earlier products as being very lightweight, reliable, and hassle-free.

BitDefender is also relatively cheap. For a fairly similar set of features between BitDefender Internet Security 2010 and Norton Internet Security 2010, I found, by clicking on BitDefender review pages to their "Buy Now" links, I could get BitDefender for as little as $40, while Norton Internet Security was at least $60 (for a CD version shipped via Amazon) and at least $70 for an instant download.

And some of the BitDefender reviews (again, from sites that profit from selling the product) were glowing. Check out this quote from one BitDefender review: "This suite is an ideal all-in-one security solution for both the beginner and the IT professional." That's the "Verdict" from one site: a great buy.

BitDefender: the bad

Here's where things get a little unpleasant. I first installed BitDefender on their 30-day free trial. I noticed that my computer got much slower than it was with Norton Antivirus 2009, which I'd had before. I also noticed that one process in particular, svchost.exe, kept cropping up again and again in my task list. Normally I see half a dozen or so of them; with BD2010 running I sometimes saw 20 or more. I had to reboot every couple of days to get rid of these extra svchost.exe processes. (I normally use Standby or Hibernate, rather than rebooting, when I am not using the computer, because Windows XP takes so darn long to start up) I can't guarantee that this svchost.exe problem was at all related to BitDefender being installed, or that the slowdown had anything to do with the additional svchost.exe tasks, but it does seem an interesting correlation.

I also noticed that browsing got extremely slow. After playing around with the BitDefender settings (which at first look really easy to manage, but after a while you find they are actually quite difficult to manage because they have overarchitected their user interface), I figured out that their anti-phishing support was what was slowing Mozilla Firefox down considerably. Even just switching between two active tabs would run more slowly, and Internet accesses were all very slow. I disabled the anti-phishing feature and found Firefox ran at its normal speed again.

Unfortunately, when you disable one of the security features of BitDefender Internet Security 2010, the BitDefender icon in the system tray shows a red exclamation mark to get your attention. But I already know I disabled this feature - and I want to keep it disabled forever. So I was no longer able to tell the difference between there being a real threat to my computer - an attempted attack, a virus or trojan on my system - and a decision I'd made to disable one of the less successful features of BitDefender.

BitDefender: the ugly

I've had a number of serious problems with BitDefender Internet Security 2010, some that started within days of installing it; others that kept getting worse and worse over time.

Laptop theft protection: I use a product called LoJack for Laptops, which installs some code to periodically contact a remote server and alert that server of the IP address where the laptop is connecting from. This periodic connection is supposed to be invisible to anyone using the laptop (or poking around on its hard drive). The idea is that, if your laptop is stolen, the next time someone using it connects to the Internet, the LoJack folks will know what IP address your laptop is at. Apparently many stolen laptops are recovered in this way.

Within days of installing BitDefender, I got an e-mail from LoJack telling me my computer was no longer sending a signal indicating its presence. I tried everything to solve this: checking the BitDefender firewall to make sure it wasn't blocking the process (it showed no sign of doing so); uninstalling and reinstalling LoJack a dozen or more times; connecting directly to my DSL modem instead of through a router; all told, I probably put 10 hours of effort (all of it with the computer running) trying to get LoJack to recognize my laptop as connected to the network; I also probably rebooted my laptop a good 20 times trying to get this working again. I eventually gave up. (If someone had stolen my laptop, they might not have been caught, but they would have had a pretty crappy antivirus program installed on their stolen system!)

Constant interruption from scans: BitDefender provides three types of scans: Deep system scans (should be done maybe once a month); Full System Scans (perhaps once a week); and Quick System Scans (I'd guess once a week a few days after the Full System Scan). It seems like a good idea, and you can set a schedule for how often you want each scan to run.

Unfortunately, the scheduling doesn't work, and the three different types of scans don't coordinate. For instance, if you leave your computer off for a few days while on vacation, both the Quick and Full system scans try to start at once, and sometimes actually succeed at running at the same time (but very slowly). And often you'll put the computer in Standby while a scan is running; when you resume, that scan resumes, but another one starts up as well. And after a scan has finished, another one of the same type might start up ten minutes, or an hour, or a day later, even though the last one completed successfully.

I got so frustrated I completely uninstalled BitDefender Internet Security 2010, downloaded their latest update to it, reinstalled it (not without problems both uninstalling and later reinstalling), and set my scan schedule so that the Deep, System, and Quick scans would not conflict. Too bad - the same old problem cropped up within days.

BSOD: The "Blue Screen of Death" or BSOD is a complete crash of Windows. It's not something you want to happen while you're busy working (or, as has become the case for me of late, when you leave your laptop on and go do something else because a BitDefender scan is taking up too much CPU time). I started noticing about a month ago that every so often I'd come to my computer and find it had rebooted - sometimes losing data I hadn't saved to disk - with the message that Windows had restarted after recovering from a serious error. Every time this has happened, it was during a System Scan or Deep System Scan. In fact, BitDefender continually tells me that it has never completed a Deep System Scan - probably because every time I run one (or it starts one on schedule), the system crashes before the scan completes.

Buggy support feature: Here's a great idea for a software product: if you have a problem, you can use the software to report the problem to the software engineers. Instead of having to search the web for help, you use the "Help me" feature of the product to enter your complaint, and the software automatically routes the problem to the software engineers to help you find an answer.

Unfortunately in the case of BitDefender Internet Security 2010, the support feature didn't work. Every time I tried to use it, it stalled while trying to upload my installation data, with the progress bar stuck at about 75% complete. So not only did I have a general problem I couldn't solve (the constant restarting of scans), but I had the problem of not being able to report my problem!

Don't waste your energy on this one

Think about how much energy an antivirus program consumes. I have removed BitDefender and installed Norton Antivirus 2011; looking in my task list I see that ccsvchost.exe, the process that runs Norton Antivirus scans, has already read 32 gigabytes of I/O, much of it presumably from my hard drive, after just one scan. An Antivirus scan inevitably requires disk I/O - it has to read every single directory on your hard drive, and scan through at least parts of many of the files on it, to detect viruses, trojans, worms, and other threats.

Obviously an antivirus scan consumes energy. The CPU is working harder - just look at the % busy on your Task Manager when a scan is running - and when a CPU works harder, it produces more heat, which means it's using more energy (and means the fan works harder to remove that heat). The disk drive works harder - because data is being read from the disk into memory.

If you install an antivirus program that keeps starting up scans that aren't needed, you're spinning your hard drive, and exercising your CPU, a lot more than you need to. If you buy an antivirus program that keeps failing to complete a scan (because the system crashes), or keeps thinking it has failed to complete a scan, and so starts a scan within hours of the last scan completing successfully, your computer is doing a lot more computation and disk I/O than it needs to. And that computation and disk I/O means energy is wasted. My laptop fan turns on when the disk has been running for more than a couple of minutes - because the disk turning produces heat. Needless to say, heat produced by a laptop means electricity is being used (since that electricity, eventually, all turns to heat). And of course the more your disk spins, and the more your fan spins, the more the wear and tear on your computer.

It may not be a coincidence that my laptop fan broke down a few months back and had to be replaced - perhaps it was all the disk I/O that BitDefender antivirus scans were performing, that caused the fan, trying to continually cool the laptop, to fail.

In any event, all this extra disk I/O, all the time spent rebooting, and all the time I was unproductive while trying to solve BitDefender Internet Security 2010 problems, amounted to a big waste of energy.

Honest advice: stay away

This BitDefender review, for one, is not going to try to make a commission off your Antivirus Software purchase.

I strongly advise you to stay away from this product. BitDefender had a great reputation in years past, and maybe in the future they will improve their products again. But I would leave them alone until at least 2012 or so. I certainly won't go back to them for a long time. Norton (or Symantec - same thing) worked for me the year before (I switched because of the cost savings), and Norton is working like a charm now that I've replaced BitDefender with it again.

Save headaches, and save wasted PC resources. Don't buy BitDefender! Try one of these antivirus or Internet security packages instead!

Return from BitDefender Review to Saving electricity or to the Green Energy Efficient Homes site home page.

© Green Energy Efficient Homes Inc. 2012  Privacy policy | Disclaimers