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Bitdefender Tried To Destroy My Windows 8 Install
I installed BitDefender Free Edition yesterday to replace Windows Defender. This morning, it popped up saying that it needed to update itself, I clicked okay -- a minute or so later, it forcefully restarted my computer without even asking me, causing me to lose some work in an unsaved program. Seriously, what software does that?
As if that wasn't bad enough, upon restart, it looks like it locked down a huge swath of files that Windows was trying to use -- just starting up took at least 5 minutes of a completely black screen. I tried a couple forced reboots here thinking it had completely frozen, but eventually just walked away, came back ~30 minutes later and it'd finally made it to the welcome screen.
When I logged in, Windows 8 started doing its "new install" thing where it shows you to move the cursor to the corners of the screen and then does "Setting up your Computer" and "Installing Apps". Once it finished that, I was left at a Windows 8 metro interface with no apps. I managed to get to my desktop which looked like a hurricane had run through it, almost all apps were missing, my desktop background didn't load, I had multiple bad strings in the start menu, etc.
Since I'd just installed BD I figured it was related to that, so managed to make my way to uninstall it, then rebooted, and my computer thankfully started up just as it always has, all my apps were still there, everything's running fine now.
I'm very experienced at dealing with computers, so I managed to recover from this, but most people probably would have had to take their computer to Best Buy or something to get it fixed. I have no idea what went wrong or why BD locked down/prevented access to so much of my system, but this is a really serious failure of the software.
I'd absolutely recommend avoiding it.
