I’ve always been a big fan of the Bitdefender line of antivirus products. My first reason for using it was the fact it was built by Romanians. I figure if Romanian hackers can do so much damage, the Romanian antivirus teams should be just as effective.
Owning licenses since the 2007 version, I recently purchased 9 licenses for Bitdefender Internet Security 2009. This is their mid-level home and small business version. It includes antivirus, firewall and other ancillary services.
I’ve only upgraded four machines. Two went flawlessly, one failed, but was resolved. The last is still a failure.
The first machine I had trouble with was an older emachines running XP SP3. The uninstall of the older version of Bitdefender didn’t go well. When I did get the new version installed it wouldn’t take the new Bitdefender Internet Security 2009 key. Contacting support, they asked me to run a few utilites and send the results. I did this and they responded almost immeditaley. It was 2:00am in the morning in the United States, so I appreciate the quick response. The issue? Uninstall spybot.
While the product works now, it does failt to update every so often. When this occurs the update process will go to 18% then start over. The fix for this is rebooting the machine.
The second machine I had trouble with was another older emachines running XP SP 3. This is a wireless machine with a Linksys WRT54G PCI card. Whatever I try to do, in any order, Bitdefender ends up preventing communication on the network. The card drivers load, the network is seen, but when the WRT54G attempts to connect to the internet it cannot. I’ve disabled the firewall, but no go. I have yet to contact Bitdefender about this issue.
While it’s worked great so far, there are two issues I’ve run into. One has a workaround and the other doesn’t:
The network function: This is a spiffy little function that allows you to monitor and manager all the computers using Bitdefender. The problem is it doesn’t work. You can register the PCs you want to comprise your network. Sometimes Bitdefender sees them and sometimes it doesn’t. When it does see them it doesn’t allow control, saying the computer is offline. Here is an example of how it looks:
If I go to the second computer, Daredevil, and look at the network, it shows both Hulk and Daredevil in the network, but Hulk is listed as Computer Offline. When I attempt to add a third PC running Vista it fails. The error message is that the computer is not running Bitdefender.
File sharing between XP and Vista: My main server is running XP SP3. Server is a gracious thing to say about it since it’s a collection of external drives. I have open shares allowing for file sharing through XP. When the Vista computer reboots it cannot connect to the network drives. Nothing changed except rebooting. The workaround is to turn the Bitdefender firewall off on the server and the Vista machine, make the connection on the Vista machine and then reenable the firewalls. This firewall change isn’t needed to go from an XP SP3 computer to the server.
Yeah, I don’t get it either. If it’s a discovery issue the XP SP3 machine would have the same problem. If it’s a firewall issue then renabling the firewalls would kill the connection. It doesn’t.
Overall I like Bitdefender for its speed and ease of use. It’s a solid value with good support.
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