Bitdefender Antivirus Free - English GUI

Oh god this stupid thing makes Windows 8.1 get stuck with file extension view and hidden files view. Only happening if BD Free is installed and goes away as soon as i get rid of it. Ugh.

 

Yep, it's a pity. Bitdefender made a free product with a great potential and then completely abandoned it.

 

I installed this thing yesterday to have a look after not using it for a year or more. It seems fine at first, but then after a reboot, the old logs button stops working again. The only reason I care about that is if I ever needed to access any quarantined files. Does anyone remember how to do that without the logs button working? I thought someone came up with a way(?)

 

Exit the GUI and re-open the application.

 

I'll be darned! Yep, that worked. That means I can use it then. Despite the bugs, it still has superior detection with minimal or no FP's. Can't beat that.

Thanks KaptainBug!

 

I have BD free on Win 7 64.
It happens here too. But only when malware is detected i.e BD install doesn't changes file extension & hidden files settings but if it detects malware then the setting is changed. I installed BD free, no settings were changed. Tested with harmless malware sample, BD detected it & the settings were changed. I changed the settings again & restarted the system & the settings were intact. So it seems the settings are changed when BD detects malware & not on install.

 

But did anyone checked if there are files in quarantined & log probs appear & after exiting & starting GUI if the files are still there in quarantined?
Hope due to logs prob the files in quarantined are not deleted.

 

I can't say on that one... I just installed, and I don't expect to see anything quarantined for a long time. But if I get one, I'll check.

 

Despite the bugs in BD free, I think its still a very good AV. Its the only good free AV, with no crapware and ads. I read in their forums, that there might be a product update once Windows 10 is released.

 

Yep, agreed. No crapware or ads is a big plus in my book. I like it that way too... I'm sure there will eventually be an update at some point.

 

A day later.... strangely enough, I booted up this morning, and the Logs button is working fine. Go figure...

 

I bet it will be dead in 2 weeks. It's a Bitdefender product ...

 

I'm not even giving it 2 days before it's dead again..

 

So why the suffering

 

I'm not talking about files that are detected, I'm talking about literally being unable to enable visibility of extensions or hidden files in Windows Explorer. You click the checkbox and it ticks and unticks itself straight away. Rebooting the system works, but the issue will re-appear sooner or later. Without BitDefender Free, i NEVER had this problem. I'm currently testing Kaspersky AV 2014 and no such issue. Neither with avast!, Panda or AVG. So it's BD Free doing it for sure.

 

It has great detection and virtually zero FP's, and I can use the exit and reload trick to get the Logs button working if I need to, so I'm sticking with it. It IS a bit buggy, but I think I can live with it. No suffering...

 

Just put this on my son's 'hand-me-down' PC (WinXP) this morning and after 3+ hours it says it is still updating (for the first time)! What gives with that?

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Edit: Wouldn't you know - a few minutes after posting this it finally completed! ...but still

 

That's unusual... only took a few minutes here... just installed it on another machine. Maybe servers are overloaded or slow for some reason? Or his internet/ISP slow?

 

Hi Kerodo,

We have FiOS (fiber) 25/25 internet so that wasn't the problem; could be server overload and I would imagine that the 'free-loaders' have very low priority. Anyhow, it will be interesting to see how well it performs on his (my old) XP laptop, 1.8GHz PentiumM w/1GB RAM.

Fwiw, I'm running BDIS on my Win7 laptop and it's performing pretty darn well.

Cruise

 

Seems to be running well here lately. It looks like it updates every 1-2 hours or so... usually the updates are very quick, so I wouldn't worry about it. Sounds good...

 

Just to let you know that my son has been using BD-Free (on WinXP) for the past week and it seems to be working very well. By that I mean it's light on his laptop's limited resources, it updates a few times every day, and hasn't introduced any conflicts or stability problems. I can't comment on the most important aspect, its antivirus capabiities, but as I haven't had any infections with my BDIS I don't expect my son to have any such issues.

Happy holidays!

 

These days 25/25 is quite slow. That's an entry level speed for some providers.

 

That's good news.. After several days, I had a bit of bad luck with it myself... The logs button stopped working again, and also the GUI wouldn't load into the tray sometimes, and nothing I did would get it there.. So I moved on. Actually, I picked up on one of the recent BitDefender Total Security promotions, 1 year free type thing, and that worked fairly well. However, yesterday I had my first Win 7 BSOD in 5 years, and it was immediately after a BD update waiting for a reboot. I clicked reboot, and got the old blue screen. So I moved on to something else once again.. Lol...

Glad it's working for your son though. That's great. Happy Holidays to you also...

 

I wonder if Bit Defender Box's client is based off this?

 

It's been well over a year and a half since I messed with BD's Free AV. Version 1.0.21.1099 warranted a look-see and I've had it running nicely on a Win7x64 desktop.

There's a full blown install of their Active Virus Control, AVC. To the best of my knowledge at this point in time, AVC is present only in Lavasoft's and eScan's paid products. The filtering libraries, avcuf32.dll and avcuf64.dll, attach to each running user process separately and if a process exceeds a threshold, the process is terminated. The threshold is determined by several local signature files, occasionally updated, some almost daily. Those libraries and signatures are all current as is the AVC Hypervisor driver. The Filter driver and Communications driver lag by one version.

The BD AV core components for signature scanning and B-Have heuristics, bdcore.dll and trufos.dll, are current. As is the local "plugins" store containing the full set of ~900 signature files. I have not determined the sigs update cycle but every time I check, they're current.

Not having experience with BD products, theirs or licensed, without the BD firewall, one library I'm not familiar with is fwlibrary.dll (July 2013), the "HIPS User-Mode module." I believe this to be for the Intrusion Detection System described on the Web site as "Ensures that applications trying to access the Internet or the network are not masked malware."

One mystery is the anti-rootkit driver which is version 1.0.28.127. Current is 3.0.2.791.

BD AV Free runs Gonzales (the cloud thing), over a dozen libraries fueling the gzserv.exe service that pretty much maintains a persistent connection to a BD server that for me is hosted by amazonaws.com, so far as I've observed. All the Gonzales files are either versions 1.0.14 or .18 or .21.

I keep mine logged in to my BD account but I don't have a clue as to what advantage that provides.

Dismissing (and a big dismissal it is) the lack of settings and the reports there is dangerously no user control over threat resolution, there's nothing in my mind that could convince me to conclude this product doesn't provide the most of best protection BD has to offer.

Conventional timeline thinking might lead to the opinion this product is abandonware, it most certainly is NOT. While the version numbers have been infrequent and the latest seemingly stalled (perhaps necessary for Gonzales only), core components and sigs are updated in the background.

Cheers.