Posted inExperience / Information Technology

Review – Bitdefender Premium Security

seasoned_geek by seasoned_geek1

Bitdefender Premium Security is yet another shining example of why no company should ever be allowed to use Agile software development. Thank God I only put this on three machines! If I had installed it on the ten machines it was licensed for all I would do all day long is re-install it on them.

★☆☆☆☆

Save These Links

Re-install using Windows 10 itself.

Forcibly remove Bitdefender paid software.

Those links are your friends. Support likes to call them “glitches” when Bitdefender renders your machine mostly useless much like the Exxon Valdez called it “a spill.” Sounds like something you can wipe up with a napkin doesn’t it? The reason you need the second link is the first link doesn’t appear to remove the corrupted settings/configuration. When Bitdefender jacks its configuration the re-installed version will try to use the same jacked settings.

DNS Gets Abused

Even though they have a setting for “passive DNS to not interfere” it still trashes DNS on a regular basis. Even Web sites like bing.com can take 3-4 reload attempts before they are found and loaded. Disable the firewall and everything works. Kinda defeats the purpose though doesn’t it?

The real kick to the crotch was the continued blocking of my email server. Not completely correct. If you leave Thunderbird up for 20-30 minutes with the message about not finding the email server you would magically see new messages appear . . . just in front of Thunderbird saying it couldn’t find your email server again.

Really Tried With This One

I re-installed. Spoke with support via message and chat. I mean I had just moved to this from McAfee and I chose Bitdefender because they said they were going to support Windows 7 for a long time. I lost track of how often I re-installed on the three machines it was on locally. Seemed like almost every day at least one needed a re-install.

Is that any way to live?

Why They Got One Star

I did get some money back. Customer service appeared to understand what kind of hand polished turd got shipped. Didn’t even have to argue, they just gave me money back. They may not have skilled software developers or an application architect creating SDLC to be followed, but they do cough up the money.

Roland Hughes started his IT career in the early 1980s. He quickly became a consultant and president of Logikal Solutions, a software consulting firm specializing in OpenVMS application and C++/Qt touchscreen/embedded Linux development. Early in his career he became involved in what is now called cross platform development. Given the dearth of useful books on the subject he ventured into the world of professional author in 1995 writing the first of the "Zinc It!" book series for John Gordon Burke Publisher, Inc.

A decade later he released a massive (nearly 800 pages) tome "The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer" which tried to encapsulate the essential skills gained over what was nearly a 20 year career at that point. From there "The Minimum You Need to Know" book series was born.

Three years later he wrote his first novel "Infinite Exposure" which got much notice from people involved in the banking and financial security worlds. Some of the attacks predicted in that book have since come to pass. While it was not originally intended to be a trilogy, it became the first book of "The Earth That Was" trilogy:
Infinite Exposure
Lesedi - The Greatest Lie Ever Told
John Smith - Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars

When he is not consulting Roland Hughes posts about technology and sometimes politics on his blog. He also has regularly scheduled Sunday posts appearing on the Interesting Authors blog.