Bitdefender Antivirus Free - English GUI

Looks promising for right now, but honestly I don't think I'll touch it, considering every free BitDefender product out there eventually becomes unsupported.

That's just me though

 

When I said fairly small, I was making a point that unless an antivirus has excessive RAM usage (e.g. hundreds of megabytes), or your computer is short on RAM, then the RAM usage does not matter. Too many people believe that greater RAM usage automatically equals reduced performance, when this is not that case.

Edit: Emsisoft do a very good of explaining it, in their blog post Why antivirus uses so much RAM – And why that is actually a good thing!



 

140MB how many hundred of gigs is?

That's another story.

Edit:
..... and Emsisoft CEO/Founder better =

 

I meant to write megabytes.

 

Yep, coming off Webroot, 140mb is not "small".

 

what are the differences in terms of protection vs the paid version?

 

Yep. It's just you.

And in considering "every free BitDefender product," there is some accuracy in that. But there has been only one BD Antivirus Free Edition.

Anyone who actually understands the product and not the endlessly regurgitated mainstream poser misinformation knows:
1) It's primarily cloud using the same Nimbus services as the premium products; "support" is on BD's end.
2) The client cloud component (Gonzales) received an update in March.
3) Other local components (i.e. AVC injectors) are updated in the background.
4) Sigs/defs and other supporting databases (i.e. smartdb.dat) are updated via an hourly check.

So for as many years (for so long, I forgot) as BDAV Free has been available, it has been supported up until... RIGHT NOW!

 

I wish I had taken better notes when I ran the current BDAV Free Edition as I don't have access to a system running it to jog my memory.

To the best of my knowledge, it did not have have the Antispam core engines (otocore.dll and wfcore.dll) and several Antiphishing libraries and their supporting repository of regularly updated signatures (op_sign and ph_sign files). Anyone running 1.0.21.1109 might correct me on this.

One way or the other, those are (still) in this beta.

I do recall the BD Core sigs/defs, those updated 5-10 times a day, in the plugins folder were a subset containing ~200 of the ~900 items for the premium products. Scanning therefore was heavily dependent on the cloud.

The beta has a plugin folder with currently the same 936 sigs/defs as in my BDIS 2016 systems. The Free BD Core & B-HAV engine (the mythological "Bitdefender engine") now has the same dependencies on the local store and cloud as the premium products.

Very interesting.

 

@haakon
So in terms of protection it has the same features than the paid version, right? interesting move of bitdefender, lets hope they update this new release more frequently.

 

Wrong. Premiums have their Ransomware Protection module for one. This is all I'm going to devote to a silly free vs paid discussion.

I fail to see why some one would assume BD would abandon the competent and timely update behavior of the previous release as described in my posts #3435 and #3380 just to pick two recent ones.

This entrenched "not supported/updated and abandoned" ignorant bigotry is so pathetic. Especially as it's constantly being wrongfully perpetrated by 4-digit post count members no matter how meticulously it's debunked over and over and over.

 

Thanks @Hiltihome . I installed but didn't check if there was a context menu scan option still present. If I am understanding you correctly, it is still there. That's good.

An option for those that want a freeware solution other than Windows Defender.

 

Doing some more research, I noticed that the drag n drop spot reappears, after all events are cleared.
Most likely a flaw, but not critical, in my opinion.

 

I looked at it for only a short while, but what I did see appeared to be a real improvement over the old BDAV Free.

Oh, I'm sure BD still needs to sort out some "stuff."

 

Of course BDF isn't going to have the same features as paid, kind of defeat the purpose of paid AV.

Funny all the complaints on this board about BDF being abandoned. There going to be focused on there flag ships first before burning resources on FREE.

 

I have using BD Free for a few months now and have been very pleased. However, I was unable to update to the new release. I am using Vista-yes still using Vista-is this new version of BD free not compatible?

 

correct its W7,8,8.1,10

 

So they have finally released officially supported 10's AV and they have completely messed it up missing the whole idea of the light AV. Darn them, time to search for a new one.

 

You look silly try to relax, and yes it was unsupported and not updated there is no official support for win 10 in the free version yet. And this was not the case in the paid version

Their antiransomware is quite mediocre so is not really an important miss

 

You don't need to burn resources you just take the paid version an disable some modules like all the other vendors do.

It's their decision to create a product with a different interface

 

Really? Note Sorin G's response...

https://forum.bitdefender.com/index.php?showtopic=70184

 

Yes, really, a beta is not an official release

 

You said "no support", official non official doesn't matter point is does support Windows 10.

And is working great on my W10

 

LOL The beta with win 10 support was released 2 days ago and windows 10 a year ago

 

lol you said no support, it's clearly supported.

 

A beta is not a public release.
And sorry I don't have time for your stupid conversation