Bitdefender Antivirus Free - English GUI

IIRC, both Bitdefender and Kaspersky were the most quiet and the leanest on bloat of the freebie AV's.

 

In my tests they are two of the worst. That is why I use Defender.

 

That was not my experience with KSC free at all... surprisingly few nags for a free av I thought.

 

The stub downloaded 548.7 MB and took about five minutes to install on my ancient Win7 i7-3770K/Z390, 8 GB, 500 GB SSD, 50 Mbps cable, gigabit Ethernet LAN.

During install, a Product reports opt-out is presented which is also toggle-able in Settings along with Special Offers and Recommendation Notifications opt-outs.

The installer insisted that my MS Security Essentials be uninstalled.

Account creation is needed, or use one you've already got. As I had the latter, I didn't investigate if there was any way around creating/using an account.

System is injected with:
vlflt Filter Driver
BDDCI filter driver
Trufos Kernel Module
Exploit Mitigation for Mainstream Applications Filesystem Minifilter
Active Threat Control Filesystem Minifilter

Application injections:
BitDefender Hooking DLL
Exploit Mitigation for Mainstream Applications Usermode Filter
Active Threat Control

I'm pretty sure I'll stuff it onto my Win7 laptop, too. But the Win10ers stay with Defender.

 

Had to uninstall this new version, after install on every boot the bitdefender agent started re downloading the install files. Even more problematic it was installed on one of my multi boot win 10 installs and it tried to download itself on my win 7 install which is already running the old free version.Not yet ready for release.

 

After retiring Bitdefender Free, Bitdefender launches Antivirus Free for Windows
March 19, 2022

 

I haven't noticed anything yet, it just works pretty nice.... however you should uninstall the old version because it could have a conflict with the new version.

https://community.bitdefender.com/en/categories/install-updates

 

Old version was uninstalled, even after uninstalling the new version Bitdefender agent tried to reinstall again which was not the experience with the old version. had to separately uninstall Bitdefender Agent to rid myself of this program. It may be that it cannot yet cope with multi boot systems . Will give it time to mature before trying again. Will linger here to see how others get on with it. Best Regards.

 

I had no idea another free version came out. They really communicated poorly on this. I figured they just killed it off, and didn't realize they were planning on replacing.

 

Bitdefender Free old spit bunch of errors during setup, but at least it worked afterwards, this new version does not even run after a successful setup. I guess it has too many dependencies, thus malware can easily disable it.

 

I think they suddenly changed their mind due this war between russia and ukraine, several countries bans kaspersky and i think BD smells a chance to win some customers ;-)
Anyway good move because BD is working great.

 

it's not only winning more customers ..... for them it's all about data gathering...
so much of people's web browsing history/habits and also makes sense for the extra samples gathered to benefit both free and paid users

 

I am curious as to what the "locked" settings are locked to. I had tried the old BD Free but uninstalled it soon after due to slow performance and a lack of AMSI script protection.

 

The locked settings are available in Total Security.

 

AMSI script protection is one of the features (maybe the most important ?) that are locked in the free mode, the rest doesnt make much difference in protection compared to the paid versions.

 

Same as the previous one. No AMSI integration for BD Free.

 

I was going to give the new free version a try, but they want me to uninstall CFW, which I am not in the mood to do.

Edit: And now they are giving me a hard time uninstalling Bitdefender agent, which I guess got installed when I was trying to install the AV. Very annoying.

 

Salutations/Greetings,

Incompatible software:
https:// www.
bitdefender.com/business/support/en/77209-79480-software-incompatible-with-best.html

Let us know on wilderssecurity , what happen?

 

I consider that a serious deficiency, esp. compared to Kaspersky Free or MS Defender, which both have it.

I found BD did not uninstall cleanly, leaving behind about 100 MB of various files and folders strewn throughout Program Files and App Data. At the time, there was no removal tool available for the free version.

 

Another great programming success it looks like. It's a test to see if you can find a way to uninstall it. I had the same issue with the paid version.

 

I tried the new BD Free myself, downloaded it on Friday, decided Saturday that I did not like it and had to use a combination of Revo and HiBit Uninstallers and a system restore back to March 8th. HiBit took out most of the BD files Revo missed but even with those and a restart I still had some leftover BD files. I used Everything to identify and delete them manually. It's a royal pain to get rid of BD.

 

A system image restore is really the only sure-fire way to get it off your machine without pain.

 

This may be the best example and a cogent argument to stay away from 3rd party AV's. The usage of "hooks" employed by different apps pops up in random discussions. And in the case of 3rd party AV's, they're dead serious about it on a whole new level.

 

First you have to install AV and after that CFW , in that order there is no problem.

In case for uninstall best way, use Hibit uninstaller and BD uninstall tool

 

I think it would

I could not agree more. I only use MS Defender because it lacks the bs that the third party boys like to throw at us. Simple, integrated, effective and quiet. None of the others have all of these properties and I have tested them all.