Wanted better protection, but having issues with this product

Goof

My top 5 AV where (in no order): Kaspersky, Bitdefender, Avast, Avira, ESET. And I considered Kaspersky/Bitdefender as top 2.  I was using panda cloud for me, wife and parents with my other PC's using free things for many years considering it good enough. But wanting better protection, mostly for those who can't help themselves (my parents, and kids) While Bitdefender has for quite some time always been among top 5  finally giving it a try using the family pack.

So far, I'm questioning the sites like AV-comparatives and others because I'm disappointed and appalled...

1. Only a few clicks from yahoos front page and parents get the you are infected with a virus scam with multiple pops ups and are uncloseable through User Interface, and looping audio/flash. Protection from this kind of stuff is my reason for going from who I was using. 

2. The amount of false positives is staggering.  Now to be honest when I drill down some get labeled as PUA/PUP or joke. But really, a dumb program I wrote in the 90's using VB (or delphi dont remember) gets labeled. PC network tools get labled (think it was angri ip scanner, vnc) and no CD cracks.

3. It's default actions are VERY DESTRUCTIVE! It auto deletes files and auto clears vault with out ever letting you know. 

3a. AV, even in "auto pilot" should still have a small alert off taskbar notifying when it did something.

3b. No AV should ever ever ever ever auto remove from vault! Worse yet is defaulting to do it.  I can't even find where I can turn that off in bitdefender, best I can do is give it 999 days...

4. When it finds something, it treats/labels them all as viruses, only after when I go back to view history fix what it did can I see that it labeled as joke or what not. Even Symantec (did, been a few years) tells me what classification, and I can turn off joke and such.

5. Contacting, interacting with support. Umm, so far practically non existing. Starting from https://central.bitdefender.com/support , after going through small list of unrelated "RECOMMENDED ARTICLES" if I click one I can select to contact support from there, limited to a few sentences.. Can't see tickets or corespondents, tickets being closed because inactivity yet never got an answer.

6. Can't get any details on "Parental Advisor" features. 

7. The ransomware protection is a joke, it just breaks things and makes you hate it. It doesn't even pop up with "xyz application trying to access your data, allow/deny". Instead you have to close out of program(unless it crashed) and a few clicks later have it allowed and restart the application. It also should have a very large whitelist to start out with, with known respectable companies and programs.

8. It's riddled with options scattered through out(hidden) it's interface. General settings, then each module has it's settings, and understanding what those options mean or due...

9. Scanning a 320G mostly full took like 12+ hours and was stuck on 99% for 10 hrs after that. Telling it to stop didn't work. Also browsing on this system is now painful.  I suspected this system to have some kind of virus/rootkit hidden that also broke windows update and causes high CPU in svchosts. Nothing finds anything, So I don't blame bitdefender, will be re-installing soon.

10. Using DVD/USB devices now painful slow. is it trying to do a full scan?

11. Any way to tell if the "web protection" its actually working?

Goof

Gah sorry, really ment to preview, then tried to edit but...  Will just go with above, with the question of what are some ways to solve the problems I'm having that I listed above?

Goof

So more and updates..

Re-installed the OS on the PC that was having toons of issues. It had a faily hard drive.  But when I was installing bit defender it found a virus, asked for reboot, and only pieces of it where left where I couldn't uninstall them and couldn't install it. Had to search and find an app you guys have to remove it. After getting defender back on fully, I can only assume it saw itself as a threat and self destructed as PC was installed using ISO from microsoft, with wsuoffline applied before going online. So there was no virus.

 

On my main PC, it's been causing havoc, it made it so I couldn't see hidden files, but a few days later looks like its now fixed/patched nearly a week later.   Also It seams every time/most of the time when it finds a threat, and I go in and view and remedy it, my mouse pointer goes away or is corrupted.  So far only thing I find to fix it is rebooting.   I've been cleaning up old backup's and I deal a lot in the security and other misc stuff where overzealous/false positives/or I know it is... So it's been happening more than I like.  Normally I reboot a few times per year....so this ######.

 

The fake AV call "microsoft" sites, that are 1-2 clicks from yahoos main page looks www.1tracksource.online, www.30red-code.online based... now being blocked via ublock for parents. But I am having difficulty testing to verify bitdefender is actually protecting it.  Is there a non destrutive site to test on? like how opendns one can test via internetbadguys.com?(my complaint #11 from above...)

Is there no way to get more control and insite to what bitdefender finds? As I mention above, it finds things that I programmed back in the 90's, that I'm 100% positive are harmless in every way. Some of them when restoring them show as joke, and others PUA. (which makes the category of whats Unwanted very wrong...)

Sorin G.

Hello,

 

Would be best to contact our support team via bitsy@bitdefender.com and provide them with the logs from both the Bitdefender Support Tool and the System Log.

http://www.bitdefender.com/support/How-to-generate-a-support-log--1168.html

http://www.bitdefender.com/support/total-security/-490.html