New Bitdefender Free is inferior to the previous version

zenwho

I just updated Bitdefender Antirus free to the latest version (which was quite a baffling ordeal, involving 9 different downloads of the 283 MB install file and 8 failed attempts to install properly). Compared to the previous version, this new one is not very user friendly.  Maybe it's because I'm still using Windows 7, and the new BD is designed for Windows 10, but the new interface and functionality feels "dumbed down".  There's no context menu option to scan individual files or folders?  I have to instead open the BD UI and then drag and drop items onto it?  In the system tray I used to be able to click the BD icon once to open a mini window with various options and info in one compact space.  Now I have to double-click to open the interface, then click the settings button and select a category from the dropdown menu.

The really annoying thing is all my old file and folder exclusions from the previous version were not preserved, since I had to run the Gonzales uninstall tool to remove all traces of that older software.  Considering all of the false-positives in BD scans, I now have to start over with several years' worth of quarantines/recovers/excludes to drive me crazy.

I know I'm nitpicking a free product, but I really don't like this new version.  I wish I never updated the older version.

Rampant

The files and folders you can scan context.

zenwho

There is no context menu (right-click) item for "scan with Bitdefender" with my installation. If there is supposed to be, then the Bitdefender installer did not properly add those context settings to the registry.

Rampant

You need to reinstall the antivirus.

zenwho

I uninstalled Bitdefender, ran the Gonzales uninstall tool, then ran the Bitdefender installer with administrator privileges to install the antivirus software (milestone 10th time since August 1st!).

Made no difference.  There is still no context menu item(s) for Bitdefender.

From the screenshot above, it would seem that the context menu is properly configured by the Bitdefender installer in Windows 10.  As I mentioned in my original post, I am using Windows 7.  I guess not as much Quality Assurance was performed for this operating system?

One other thing I noticed re: the differences between the previous version of Bitdefender and the current one is the size on disk.  From my installation logs, the version of Bitdefender free that I installed in 2013 was 73.72 MB.  The current version of Bitdefender free requires 1.57 GB of disk space.  Is the new version also 21x better then the older one?!

zenwho

I finally discovered the reason that Bitdefender does not show up in my context menu: I am using Directory Opus as my replacement for Windows Explorer, which I consider a primitive file manager.  Bitdefender, for design reasons known only to Bitdefender, has decided to support context menu items only in explorer.exe.  So anyone who uses any another file manager will not see Bitdefender in the context menu.  As far as I know, there are no technical reasons why Bitdefender's context-menu options cannot be allowed in 3rd-party file managers.  Just a strange and arbitrary decision by Bitdefender.