More Suggestions To Improve Bitdefender

John Kemp

We all know that BitDefender is going through an extended rough patch at the moment, but the poor programming is aggravated by poor documentation and ‘flagging’ of error messages and issues, and there is also poor documentation on the website.

Programming issues: I have made several constructive issues in another post (http://forum.bitdefender.com/index.php?showtopic=16498 ) but I have some more ideas also, designed to enable BitDefender to be ALWAYS active when connected to the internet, even when updating.

These ideas in topic 168498 are quite radical, but I have another approach which might be easier to implement: (1) create a self-contained module within the firewall that stays active when BD is switched off for updating. This would be a simple module that would do just one thing, and which would (hopefully) not need updating itself: it would disallow ALL incoming traffic except that from the BitDefender site. (2) After the download, defer the update till the user comes offline (invite him to do so) or till there is a switch of users OR the user shuts down (like Windows Update does). In these last two cases, the program could force a disconnection from the internet, which would not be disruptive in these cases.

When BD detects that a “scan has never been performed” and that it has “never been updated”, as it does after a new or clean installation, it runs the scan and then says that the update has failed. This is because it can’t update when scanning. Ridiculous! Tweak the programming such that when it finds these two issues, it update FIRST, and THEN does the scan!!!

These are some of the documentation issues I have encountered (in random order):

”A screen saying "BitDefender Security Services has encountered a critical

error" but it appears to continue working OK!!!

Users were not automatically upgraded or invited to upgrade – a free upgrade - to BD2010 but in my case, found out about the upgrade by chance.

The website should recommend that the removal tool and upgrades (e.g. to BD2010.exe) are downloaded BEFORE removing the old version, and that a Restore Point is made BEFORE AND AFTER removing the old version, and that the user comes offline while the program updates itself. This is designed to minimise the time that the computer is unprotected. I am fairly computer literate and did all this, but some customers won’t have thought to do this sequence.

I can find NO LINK TO THE FORUMS FROM THE MAIN BD WEBSITE!!! Why not? (A cynic might suggest that with its current problems, the less the forums are exposed to the outside world the better!)

The serial numbers for forum topics are given in the URL, but not on the webpage itself. It would be useful to be able see this number displayed more prominently, and to be able to refer to them and search them by this number.

Best wishes, John K

St31F

I can find NO LINK TO THE FORUMS FROM THE MAIN BD WEBSITE!!! Why not? (A cynic might suggest that with its current problems, the less the forums are exposed to the outside world the better!)

Yes, I agree with John K. To me the main BD website is focused on sales and promotion of their products and very little towards technical support. I just happened to find this forums website by chance while searching for some form of support with regards to the 3 November major update.

Users were not automatically upgraded or invited to upgrade – a free upgrade - to BD2010 but in my case, found out about the upgrade by chance.

On this point I have to disagree. I received an email from BD at the beginning of October informing me of the launch of BD2010. When registering BD did you tick to recieve information from BD with regards to new and current products? This is the only explanation that I can think of as to why you weren't aware of the free upgrade.