Bitdefender Antivirus Plus (2014)

Pros Very good scores in PCMag's antivirus tests. Great scores in independent lab tests. Excellent phishing protection. Prevents transmission of private data. ID theft monitoring. New Wallet manages passwords, private data. Safepay hardened browser protects financial transactions. Scans Facebook profile, scans system for vulnerabilities. New Security Report summarizes each week's events.

Cons Some difficulty installing on malware-infested systems. Wallet password management limited. Wallet can't fill Web forms. Bottom Line Core antivirus protection in Bitdefender Antivirus Plus (2014) gets good scores in my tests and great scores from the independent labs. The "Plus" in the name refers to an impressive collection of effective, relevant, security tools. It's a great choice.

By Neil J. Rubenking

If you give away your antivirus protection for free, how will you convince people to pony up for the paid edition? Well, one way is to make it do more than the free edition does, preferably much, much more. That's the approach taken by Bitdefender Antivirus Plus (2014). For $39.95 each year you get antivirus protection that's more advanced than the free edition plus enough additional, relevant, effective security features to make your head spin.

Bitdefender's latest premium antivirus incorporates a new technology that the company calls Photon. According to the Bitdefender website, Photon is "an innovative technology that visibly improves speed and performance in a matter of hours by gradually molding to your PC." In testing, it proved better at malware cleanup than Bitdefender Antivirus Free Edition (2014), which doesn't include Photon technology, but not vastly better.

This edition looks much the same as the previous. Its main window displays a green, yellow, or red banner reflecting current security status, and six big panels offer access to six major security components. You can arrange these panels so that your four favorites appear at startup. In its default Autopilot mode, Bitdefender doesn't pester you with popups. If something happens that might need your attention, it notes the event on the Events page and displays the current number of unread event items, which you can review at your own convenience.

A handy desktop Widget gives you a quick view of security status, antivirus activity, the number of unread notification events, and more. You can use it for quick access to the full event list, or to the online My Bitdefender portal. Still using XP? Don't worry; the Widget works with all Windows versions from XP to 8.

Some Installation Difficulty
Documentation for Photon includes the statement, "Now, more than ever, installing Bitdefender on your machine will avoid slowdowns and freezes, and will imply a seamless and secure experience." That's probably true, once you get it installed. However, installing the product on eight of my twelve malware-infested test systems took some extra work.

As with Bitdefender Free, a scan using the Bitdefender Rescue CD handled one test system taken over by ransomware, another infested with malware that actively fought back against the Bitdefender installer, and a third system that repeatedly crashed during installation. The Rescue CD proved effective, though its malware cleanup can be extremely slow.

Bitdefender's preinstall scan damaged critical files on one test system, making it unbootable. It turns out the Rescue CD is a full-scale operating system environment with a file manager, browser, and Linux console. I used it to gather logs for tech support, and to run fix-up scripts they supplied after analyzing the logs. It took a while, but we got this one working again.

A product that installs with little or no difficulty gets five stars for ease of installation. If the problem can be solved using a rescue CD or other ancillary tool, that's still good, so it's worth four stars. Bitdefender gets three stars for ease of installation; I managed to get it working, but it took a good bit of back-and-forth with tech support. Bitdefender Free required even more of my time working with tech support, enough more that it rated just two stars in this area.

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