Although BitDefender isn’t necessarily a household name like Symantec or Trend Micro, they’ve been around for eight years making Antivirus and other security solutions for home and business users. How does their latest version of BitDefender Antivirus rate? Read on to find out.
BitDefender Antivirus 2009 isn’t just an antivirus program. In addition to antivirus scanning, BitDefender offers the following features:
- Heuristic and definition based virus and spyware detection and removal
- Real time scanning of web, e-mail and instant messaging traffic with browser plug-in
- Block attempted identity theft by restricting or blocking registry changes, running scripts or cookies
- Encrypts Yahoo Messenger and Windows Live Messenger traffic
- Monitors for Operating System vulnerabilities, risky system configuration settings (such as a weak Administrator password) and out of date 3rd party software
- Home Network option to manage other computers on your network with BitDefender Antivirus
Although BitDefender Antivirus is BitDefender’s lower priced product (behind BitDefender Internet Security and BitDefender Total Security), it still offers a good mix of the basic necessities of an Antivirus program with some additional niceties such as the web plug-in and vulnerability monitoring.
Installation is pretty painless – following the on screen prompts and a reboot, BitDefender will start a configuration wizard asking if you want to start in a basic or advanced user interface and whether it should perform an update and initial scan.
Once BitDefender Antivirus was installed, I performed a definition update and let a quick scan run. The whole process took about ten minutes from start to finish. I particularly liked the numbered step approach to the wizard and scan dialog boxes – BitDefender does a great job informing you of exactly what its doing and what the next steps are.
The user interface starts in basic mode, but an advanced interface is available if you want to tweak some of the more advanced options. I found both interfaces easy to use and intuitive. The basic interface sets sensible default options and hides some of more periphery functions that most home users won't bother with. The advanced interface again remains intuitive but offers more tweaking options for each of the modules.
Regarding performance – most virus scanners I’ve seen will bog down your computer to the point of it being unusable during a full system scan. I’m happy to report that BitDefender Antivirus utilizes a pretty light footprint when it comes to scanning – only using 20-30% of the CPU and a measly 15MB of RAM. I was somewhat surprised that BitDefender doesn't let you throttle CPU usage like most mainstream Antivirus applications do.