Sunday, March 4, 2012

Bitdefender Total Security 2012 Review – I) Installation

Well you might be surprised and ask why I am doing a Security Product review suddenly? So before you ask let me tell … I had been contacted by Bitdefender and asked if I wanna write a review on their product Bitdefender 2012 Security Suit. I have used lots of other Antivirus and Software Firewalls but I had not used Bitdefender, I thought ok I will give it a shot on one Testing windows PC to see how it works.

Surprisingly when I registered one License key from Bitdefender, They were generous to provide me with 5 more keys to give to my friends. Well those keys are already distributed to friends so don’t ask me for a key :-)

Since I am too lazy to write the whole review at a time I thought to do it in pieces. So I will start with installation process of this and in later part I will cover other aspects of this suit.

I have made signs as bellow
-ve point = Negative Point (Whatever I did not like)
+ve point = Positive Point (I liked this)

This was the system config of the machine where I installed Bitdefender 2012 Total Security suit


The Installation:

1) No offline Installer (-ve point)

First point I noticed about the setup that it was completely online installer. Either there is no offline install or I am not able to found the offline installer for Bitdefender 2012 Security Suit. Well this is a negative point in my opinion. I had given a of Bitdefender to one of friend who’s PC was infected by some virus and he didn’t wanted the PC do be connected to Internet. But since no offline installer was found he didn’t installed Bitdefender Suit on his PC. L

2) Check conflicting products (+ve point)

Check for Other security product that might conflict with Bitdefender and runs uninstaller for those products. In my case I had Zonealarm and Avast Antivirus on the test machine. Bitdefender installed automatically run the uninstaller for both the conflicting products.

3) All products not uninstalled at one go (-ve point)

Only glitch in this I found that after uninstalling one product it only gives reboot or stop installation. It didn’t give option to uninstall all products at once and have only single reboot.

4) Not all conflicting products were uninstalled automatically (-ve point):

The Zonealarm Firewall was uninstalled properly via the Bitdefender setup, but some how it was not able to uninstall the Avast Antivirus which was present on the system. There was some error and at the time of removal of avast and PC got hanged. I don’t say it is bitdefender problem , it might be a M$ problem. I had to manually remove Avast Antivirus after reboot so the Bitdefender setup could continue.

5) First Uninstall other product then download setup: (-ve point)

According to my opinion this is a bad strategy to uninstall all the other antivirus and firewall first and then start downloading the setup files needed for continue setup. So if I get some problems downloading setup files (which I got when I was installing) then my PC is online without security products which I don’t like. I think the setup should download the files needed first then go for uninstallation of the other security products.

6) Download slow and problems continuation: (-ve point)

Bitdefnder download too Sooooo long, I went to sleep while it was downloading. On a normally 25 KB/s test connection Bitdefender setup was showing only around 10 KB/s


First I thought it was network trouble but when I started a normal download it was getting around 24KB/s



And I have tested it on multiple computer over multiple internet connections download speed of the installers seems to be a persistent issue. One other location where I installed it on the friends laptop the internet was getting disconnected quiet often. On that machine for hours I was trying to complete the installation.

7) Unable to copy or Save Licensing terms and conditions: (-ve point)

The Licensing terms and conditions is not allowing to save or copy the terms and condition that the user is agreeing to.


8) Too much time taken for first system scan (-ve point):

I have used lots of Antivirus for Bitdefender has taken most time to install on to the system. After its download has finished the setup was showing it is scanning system files for virus.


The system file scan started at 10:40 PM. It didn’t showed any progress till some minutes. I left the PC and gone to do some other work. I came back to PC after around 25 minutes and still it was not showing any progress on the progress bar.



For PC with good configuration as given in the start, I don’t think it should take that much amount of time to scan the system files.

It was around 11:20 PM and the progress bar still didn’t showed any kind of progress. L

So I was getting irritated and decided to go for sleep and do the installation some other day when I had time. But I decided to let the setup run but I didn’t know how much exact time it took to complete the setup. But at least it was completed when woke up the next morning


I will do some other tests on this suit and write about it in some days.

Do left your comments on your experience of Bitdefender if you have used it.


No comments: