BitDefender slow to update after booting

I've been testing a few different antivirus solutions in vmware lately.

I'm curious about why BD does not update immediately if the computer has been off for long enough for it to miss a scheduled update. Instead it seems to wait for the next xx past the hour triggertime.

Theoretically speaking, this could lead to a computer that's quite outdated on definitions for up to however many minutes the update interval is set for.

Anyone know if this is by design? Will it update immediately if computer has been off for xx hours/days? Or is this simply how it behaves?

 

My version of bitdefender seems to update at all times and all over the place, including at startup right after boot. So it might be in your configuration.

I had bitdefender for 2 years and was quite happy with it but it had a few annoyances which make me consider alternatives

* I could never get it to NOT update during certain hours (so the opposite of you) and an update seems to really slow down my machine (far more than running a scan!) which is extremely inconvenient when playing online games

* no firewall log. grrrr.

* some occasional mysterious slowdowns / lockups either during updates or sometimes at random

* had a BSOD twice during update when the software itself was updated. Its a known issue, but it only happened to me twice in two years.

* it keeps deleting remote administrator (the one from famatech) and I can't seem to find a whitelist to make it stop doing that

These have made me consider switching to another tool, but I must say that for the majority of the time the suite works well and uses a very reasonable amount of resources for its price, so I am undecided. I am also unsure whether some of the slowdown issues are linked to IO on my machine.

Since I don't want to pay the prices of the rich man's suites I'm looking at avira, grisoft and trend as alternatives, or to go free. or stick with BD and maybe change the firewall or harass support to help me with my little gripes

 

never had problms with updating slowly with BD.

gotta love the price you can get such a good AV at:

http://www.ebuyer.com/UK/product/120680

2pc / 2years .... sooooo cheap.

 

that's an oem license, I'm not sure what the legality of buying it for oneself is 1) to be fair you can get quite a few other virus scanners for similar prices as OEM. 2) you'd have to factor in the hardware costs you're supposed to buy at the same time.

I did get oem once when I built my dad's business's set of machines (which i did resell to him, buying several identical cases, mobos, etc. so I didnt feel like i was stretching the license that much) - and I also bought it once for $19 for my private laptop in a deal on hermannstreet

I really wonder what the exact terms of the oem license are, cause at that price I'd get my entire family rewired

 

no difference in the software, and its a legit website.

basically you just get a CD in a sleeve, no box or instructions, and your licence might be xxxxx-xxxxx-OEM-xxxx or whatever.

 

I know its a legit site, i buy loads of stuff there - I simply had never looked under the software category... That price is so tempting and i have been meaning to get a new case for a while...

Although there's a part of me that thinks that especially small developers deserve a decent payment and the people at bitdefender can't be getting a penny out of those.

On the other hand the official UK renewal price is quite high

Although to summarise back to the original question, BD certainly was updating all the time, usually just at the wrong moment in game too

 

Same here.

 

Thanks for chiming in, all.

My experience was with a trial version of BD (AV only). I verified it acted the same both in a vmware session as well as on my main box. It appeared to note the minutes of the hour it was supposed to do the next update, and stuck to that regardless of how many hours it might have lost due to computer being off.

Either way, I found it not to be an alternative. It was just too much of a resource drain. For example, when starting up Firefox it would stall the startup until it was done scanning just about everything FF related. The CPU was locked at 100% for quite some time and caused the startup time of FF to about triple. It also quite often applied the same sort of delay to opening shortcut menus and even folders at times.

For those that aren't as sensitive to the responsiveness of the OS (I didn't notice any issues during games or such), it's a very nice and cheap solution. There's a special going on right now with 2 pcs for 2 years at $40.

 

I must say I have process monitors and stuff in place and I didnt notice the kind of "100% till it scanned everything firefox related" behaviour. It's possible it's short enough that I don't notice, or my settings were slightly different.

Having just spent 2-3 days trying different products (nod beta and antivir and the comodo firewall) and losing access to half my network resources each time with no prompts and rules that I could findabout it, I am starting to appreciate more what bitdefender have done with their smooth suites. I'm pretty safe and prudent with my activities, might be I'm happy to stick with those guys after all.

Trying other scanners has already gotten old, you might say. too many teething problems no matter which one you pick

On the updates, my memory was that it would often run an update several times in one evening, but it's very possible that if you schedule a stricter update routine it doesn't catch up. That's a bit of a shame.

 

Possible. Though as far as I can remember I left everything at default. I only have a cpu monitor on desktop. I noticed a considerable delay on several operations and every time I peeked at the cpu monitor it was at 100%. I then looked down on BD's file scan monitor and it was solid green for the duration. I use FF preloader to cut down on the startup delay since it's long enough by default. BD did way more than cancel out that effect. I also can't stand delays when navigating the shortcut menus, and BD caused quite a lot of that as well (presumably it scanned the files the shortcuts went to).

My current solution (NOD32, non-beta so pure AV, no firewall) has no subjectively noticeable delay on anything I do at all, which is how I want my AV to behave.

I did use Comodo for a bit with no ill effects, but I found it to just be more hassle then it was worth. It asked about the oddest things at all possible times. Like IE attempting to use some oddball non-internet enabled application to communicate with the Internet. Eh?

I'm currently trialing Online Armor and so far happy with both its HIPS and firewall. If the firewall starts to misbehave though I'll just disable it and rely on my hardware firewall to block incoming and the HIPS should suffice to notice strange going ons.

The only setting I found was how many hours between update checks. I left that at the default 1 hour. It's a moot point now that I've decided it's not in this year's running due to the performance issues though.