BitDefender 9 Professional Plus Review

Softwin are one of the smaller developers of a combined antivirus, antispam and firewall software. They have managed to develop a good advanced software package without being picked up by a large tier one computer maker. Norton antivirus is the industry standard for preinstalled antivirus software, it is a shame that BitDefender has not been preinstalled on more pc's.

BitDefender combines the ease of use of having 3 products combined together in one software package with the ability to make system wide changes to your security settings using just one screen.

After installing BitDefender i was pleasantly suprised to see that all of the settings for initial use were configured correctly so that a first time user could make his or her pc secure straight aware. An update was pulled down and installed and a scan of the boot drive as well as all running services. This is what all antivirus software should do at first install. The antivirus is no more intrusive when doing a scheduled scan as any other corperate solutions i have found and the on access scanning did not slow my computer down at all.

The firewall part of the suite also appears to be correctly set up to allow ease of use for inexperianced computer users and immediate security to the system. Many other firewalls will ask you to allow access to all pieces of software even Internet Explorer. BitDefender has a selection of commonly used software packages already added to its database of definitions. So a new user is not scared off by the huge amounts of pop ups that other firewalls can give.

I am less convinced with the antispam system. Although it is supposed to have bayesian filtering to allow it to learn and filter spam emails more effectivly, it never succeded in blocking very similar emails even though i had classed them as spam.