[escalated]bitdefender 2012 Issues

I am with Ahmed on this, I am totally freaked out by the massive changes between 2011 and 2012.

It seems like half the features have been removed from 2012, like the antiphishing and the scan scheduling, at least from the GUI.

There's now this big "auto-pilot" catch word that's supposed to make all the decisions for the user, but there is absolutely nothing in the software, or during setup, or on the web site, or on the product's fact sheet, that says what this frigging unadvertised new feature does exactly. Or "SafeGo."

Same for other feature changes, like the logs are apparently now called events. I don't mind changes, but you are making existing 2011 users' life miserable by not summarizing the changes so we can adapt.

I am not a control freak, but I like to understand what the software that runs on my computer does, so i can assess the security risks by myself. If "auto-pilot" takes the right decisions and does the right things, I'm fine with that, but why won't you tell us about it?

As for the automatic reversal of the Windows 7 Folder Options (item #3), I also noticed it with BDAV 2011 but didn't know at the time it was linked to BDAV. I almost never have viruses, so I didn't even think my recent unexplained folder options reversal could have been caused by BDAV. This is a very bad bug if Ahmed is right. I use the same Folder Options settings he does.

I don't have a memory problem (item #2) so far with the latest version.

BDAV 2012 (bdagent.exe) is usually under 1KB, sometimes temporarily peaking to 3KB while I am using the computer.

While I am at it, 3 other issues:

4) Some events such as "Media Autorun Issue" don't have any explanation in Events Details. Please review all possible events and make sure the customer can understand what's going on and how to fix it. It would be great also to be able to flag certain events as OK, so BDAV does not report them in the future. For instance, I am pretty sure this event is caused by a fixed USB drive I use for backups, it has an autorun (probably unnecessary) and a special icon in it for Windows Explorer. It should be easy for BDAV to store the parity checksum of the autorun and to ignore this drive (the drive letter is not even mentioned in the event!) until the checksum changes, or something.

5) There is a regression compared to BDAV 2011: The language packs in Windows 7 Ultimate are reported as "Other Windows Updates" with the message "It is strongly recommended to install them in order to have your system protected." This is total cow manure, language packs have nothing to do with security and most people install only a few language packs at most, they shouldn't have to install all 35 language packs just to please BDAV. Please be better integrated with Windows base features and ignore all language packs.

This recommendation message probably looks even more stupid on Vista Ultimate, where some of these "Windows Update" apps are poker games, not just language packs.

6) In Events, the button "Mark all as read" does nothing, my 3 events stay unread.

There will probably be other issues to report, I am too new to BDAV 2012, but first impressions are not so good so far. I like some of the simplifications, like the removal of the 3 different basic, intermediate and expert interfaces, the removal of the confusing 4-5 different scan tasks, or some of the changes, like the logs being made more visible, although they are now accessible only from the Home page, not any page. I am sure that I'll get used to some of the changes with time, but there is still this feeling that some tasks are missing and I have no clue if BDAV is really working on my security or just pretending to, wasting CPU cycles. I don't think this feeling will disappear with time if BitDefender does not explain what BDAV does, how it works and what these new features with weird names do.

I found out what was wrong with the "Mark all as read" button:

It does work as it's supposed to, but the problem is that there is nothing to tell you if there are any unread events in the different tabs.

So when I tried to mark 3 events as read, it turned out that these 3 events were already read, or maybe didn't even count as events that could be marked as read or unread because all 3 were green or oranges, not red. So basically I was pressing that button and nothing happened. The 3 unread events reported by BDAV 2012 were in a different tab.

I think 1) the button should be grayed out if there are no unread event in a given tab, 2) each tab name should indicate the number of unread events, like "Virus Scan (3)," 3) All unread events should appear visibly different from read events, with a different color or a read/unread checkbox or something and 4) Each action should provide feedback to the user, a message "There are no unread events in this section" would have helped me figure out what was going on.

The new design is ridiculous, I still can't figure out from the logs if my system has been scanned at 100% over the successive passes at idle, or scanned at all, since the logs don't report scan events, only negative issues such as detected viruses. I don't even know what the auto pilot thing is, and if the scans happen automatically even in non auto pilot mode, or what the safego feature is either.