180 days free-BitDefender Products

Verify if the service is running. Service name all start with Bitdefender. If the service is running, then you have the GUI bug I was refering to in another post.

 

I'm talking about the CURRENT free version. The entire point of the free version is to be able to do right click on demand scanning of a particular file. It doesn't work. If BD cannot make a free version that works these days...well, I certainly would never risk trying a paid version as the paid versions are far more invasive and I would be very scared that my computer would not even boot if I installed one.

Avira makes a free version that is NOT old and that works properly. If BD cannot do that or is unwilling.... and what I read in their forum really opened my eyes ....then I don't want to try any paid version. It is a very poor advertisement for BD to care so little about their free version that it doesn't work at all and according to the forum ...they don't care. I compare that poor attitude to the attitude from Avira and Avast and AVG.

 

The current free version is an old version of BD. It doesn't even work on Vista SP1, doesn't have the same heuristic or gui as the current version. So you can't make a comparison with it at all.

Kinda stupid not to try a new version of a program because an old version has a bug on your system.

 

I am not sure what free version you are using, but the current BD 10 Free works very well here on the "Contextual Menu Scan" and has done for many months

 

All the services were running. But I did not bother to have it on my computer anymore, so I just uninstalled it. But it was very light, I must say. So that was definitly a plus.

 

Installed the 90 day BD Suite trial today and it's running well. It is indeed amazingly light on resources as far as ram goes, perhaps the lightest suite I've seen yet. I had Avira Premium on alone before this, which is super light, and this BD Suite only uses another 4mb ram above Avira, including the firewall and all features. So that is pretty impressive. I am comparing things based on free system ram after install.

I enabled the web scanner, and it seems ok. There is some slowdown of browsing, but I think that is fairly typical. Nothing too bad though. Overall I am getting pretty good performance..

 

I had a problem with BD free version which I am not sure they ever fixed or not. But the services run in the background all the time. And if you disable the running services everything in quarantine can freely make outbound connections. I caught it with Online Armor when I had an XP box (HP) this past fall. Actually what was in quarantine was just backweb. But when the services were disabled there were communication attempts from backweb (located in quarantine) to an HP IP. I posted about this here and the BD forum but not sure if it was ever fixed.

 

But I only want an ON DEMAND scanner. So, if the free version doesn't work then I am not interested iin BD. I was only thinking of trying the full version because of this free offer. I don't want all the crap that all the AV companies are putting in their paid versions. What I want doesn't exist I guess. But I did really like BD free version 8 which I used exclusively as my only AV scanner for over a year.

 

I read at their forum that you have to disable autorun for two services from BD that don't exist in the free version but that BD never bothered to fix when the bug was reported to them. I had Event Viewer errors and that is why I went lookng for information and found that the Event Viewer errors were due to non existent services that couldn't run because they don't exist. A mod in the forum indicated that BD might never fix the problem...because BD Free is free and well, we wouldn't want to offer something free that actually works right now would we?

BD8 free did not have problems on XP. I think perhaps BD should withdraw the current free version since they don't appear to want to have it run properly (and I am not talking about it running on Vista...I have XP).

As for the GUI, I like the BD10 free GUI. I don't like the new GUI for Avira so there is a good chance I wouldn't like the new GUI for BD either.

 

Mele20

You can always perform a clean install to see if that solves the problems with the free edition. You can use this tool. First right click on the red BitDefender icon near the system clock press on exit. Run the tool and when asked reboot your computer. Did you also tried if contextual scan works when you are logged in another useraccount?

 

Thank you. I will try that later. I only have the Admin account so I can't try any other user account.