What Do Profiles Actually Postpone Or Disable?

mr_stealth

The new Profile feature looks a lot better than the old Game Mode, but it's something I'm not ready to use without knowing more about what it really does. The product documentation provides very little detail, stating things like "Unnecessary background programs are suspended."

Is this referring to Windows services that can be disabled during a gaming session without issue, or are user-installed applications that I might want to keep running going to be stopped as well?

Will all of the suspended programs be automatically restored when the Standard profile is reactivated?

I assume that "Maintenance tasks are postponed" refers Windows' own scheduled tasks like disk defragmentation and backup. Is this also going to prevent 3rd party applications from performing scheduled tasks, such as update checks that are executed via Windows' Task Scheduler?

I'm also curious about the Real-Time Optimization feature. From the description in the documentation, it sounds like it might be monitoring and adjusting CPU priority or affinity for background applications.

Lastly, I would like to see an option for profiles to be activated automatically without enabling Autopilot for the full BitDefender suite.

mr_stealth

So, I answered at least part of this myself after installing BD2015 on my laptop. The only "unnecessary background program" that seemed to be effected was an updater from Adobe, armsvc.exe. There are some others that i expected to see stopped, like the update checker for Java and utilities for my printer, but they remained running. Shutting down a single process with a small footprint isn't likely to have any noticeable improvement, but I assume that the list of programs detected will grow over time. My laptop is clear of the typical clutter I find on others' PCs, so it's not surprising that Profiles found little to stop. Windows services appeared to remain unaffected, which is probably the safest route to go, even if some could be temporarily stopped for a gaming session with no impact.

When the standard profile is reactivated, the stopped background program was immediately restarted. The same restoration of previous state happens with the power and visual settings option. I would, however, like to see those two separated into their own options. The power settings adjustment does nothing for my laptop's existing high-performance profile other than reducing my display sleep timer.

Real-Time Optimization does indeed alter CPU priority of games to "Above Normal", but I'm unsure if there are any other changes. I did not go through the list of running processing to see if any others had been set to a lower priority.

It's also unclear as to what maintenance tasks are being disabled, and how. Task Scheduler did not show any changes, so I guess that tasks like scheduled disk defrag would be postponed by some other means than tampering with the task's settings.

I saw no indication of which Windows alerts and pop-ups are disabled. The options in Windows' Action Center remain unchanged. Those notifications for features like Backup and Windows Update are typically the only ones I see from Windows.

And there is one aspect of the product settings changes with profiles that seems odd, disabling the Search Adviser. I often alt-tab out of games to do searches for game info. There are lots of shady sites that end up in search results for popular games, looking to clickbait gamers with walkthroughs or relevant game info that doesn't exist. Perhaps I'm underestimating the performance impact of this feature, but it seems like disabling it would be more security risk than performance improvement. Or does this feature intercept all traffic on the system, potentially impacting network performance of online games?

Georgia

Hello,

For more details on what Bitdefender Profiles are and how they work please read this article:

http://www.bitdefender.com/support/what-ar...-work-1297.html

RoloX2

Hello,

For more details on what Bitdefender Profiles are and how they work please read this article:

http://www.bitdefender.com/support/what-ar...-work-1297.html

That article did not provide the detail asked for in this discussion; it did not mention the other, non-BD services/background tasks it disables (such as Windows Update).

Some of us need technical details in order to evaluate/implement/troubleshoot BD properly and can't do anything with marketing-speak.

In my case, the game profile caused a game to crash on startup, preventing it from running. I don't have proper documentation to troubleshoot so I have to disable the BD bloat.

Nesivos

That article did not provide the detail asked for in this discussion; it did not mention the other, non-BD services/background tasks it disables (such as Windows Update).

Some of us need technical details in order to evaluate/implement/troubleshoot BD properly and can't do anything with marketing-speak.

In my case, the game profile caused a game to crash on startup, preventing it from running. I don't have proper documentation to troubleshoot so I have to disable the BD bloat.

That is why I use BD W8 Security on W8.x computers. No bloat.

RoloX2

That is why I use BD W8 Security on W8.x computers. No bloat.

I'll run Microsoft Security Essentials before I run Windows 8, hehe.

I'm with you, though. After BD runs out, my plan as it stands right now, is to run BD free. Talk about no bloat!

What I don't understand is that as big (whether fat pig big or Arnold Schwarzenegger big) as BDTS is, it still lacks key customisation options (like not having hard-coded profile lists " /> )