Bitdefender 2019 issues.

Firstly I want to say I share a key with another account so this is just my account with no licences attached to it.

I have been using and recommending Bitdefender to everyone since 2016 and the 2018 edition was nearly perfect (apart from a buggy firewall) so when I reinstalled windows on my PC and installed 2019 I was appalled with the garbage software "upgrade" that was this version.

-Performance hit is dreadful compared than any previous version I have used. RAM usage is borderline unacceptable (500Mb+ For just the Security service process) and processes like the "wallet agent" running in the background when I will never use the wallet agent.

-Making a Windows-To-Go USB stick using an ISO downloaded using the official Microsoft media creation tool and half way through the process Bitdefender went and locked a WinSxS component from the iso as a virus and proceeded to close the program do to "Malicious activity" and completely locked the files causing me having to disable every component I could in Bitdefender including the antivirus permanently and a restart to unlock the files Bitdefender was locking. I had to leave every component disabled until I had finished creating the Windows-To-Go stick.

-Bitdefender is causing some sort of weird startup delay of all my programs even though I am booting a heavily optimised windows install with little running in the background (system processes included) and I am booting from an NVME M.2 SSD running in PCIE mode.

-The new interface is a step back like 5 years, everything is everywhere and the configurable options that were inside the individual components (antivirus, firewall... etc) are lacking compared to earlier versions.

I am sorry but as someone who usually has people coming to him asking for advice on which security suite is the best for their computers, Bitdefender has slipped off of my recommendation list due to the amount of frustration that has been caused by the 2019 edition over the past month.

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palace

I would have to agree. I have been Using Bitdefender for some time after moving from Avast. Avast also made the mistake of turning a relatively low resource product into a bloated and slow app with poor UI. Like you I found 2018 to be very good and unobtrusive. I have experienced the same issues, and I'm sick of having to click "OK Got It" every time windows starts. Still working out how to kill that. BD2019 is certainly more in your face and the UI is bad.

Sadly I've still got a fair bit of the subscription left, but will be looking around for other products.

father-ted

Maybe they will release updates to improve it soon?

I hope so, as I have had nothing but hassle since I upgraded from the 2018 version

I cannot use hyperlinks from outlook any more - massively annoying to say the least!

boby44

Hey guys

I just upgraded Total security 2019 to this new version and interface and this screwed my computer. All apps are opening very slowly.

I tried everything, disabled every option, nothing. For now I removed Bitdefender completely as I can not work this way.

I will contact their support and ask for solution.

NeoReaper

I am glad I am not alone in this, honestly I know there are moderators watching this forum, I ask kindly of them to push this to their support team since I am on the edge of doing the same, removing Bitdefender completely.

NeoReaper

Guess what guys? If you uninstall Bitdefender it stops murdering your SSD's read and write speed + the IOP's!

Your software is literally a virus right now, it completely kills the system drives performance and the worst part about it is its basically invisible in task manager, I had to use process explorer and look deep into the services to find Bitdefender was constantly reading and writing to my SSD causing it to be sluggish like I was still on a harddrive.

With Bitdefender I was lucky to get around 200-300Mb/s writes from my NVME drive, after I was back up at 1Gb/s.

And yet still no response from any of their support mods on the forum.

Spulci

17 hours ago, NeoReaper said:

Guess what guys? If you uninstall Bitdefender it stops murdering your SSD's read and write speed + the IOP's!

Your software is literally a virus right now, it completely kills the system drives performance and the worst part about it is its basically invisible in task manager, I had to use process explorer and look deep into the services to find Bitdefender was constantly reading and writing to my SSD causing it to be sluggish like I was still on a harddrive.

With Bitdefender I was lucky to get around 200-300Mb/s writes from my NVME drive, after I was back up at 1Gb/s.

And yet still no response from any of their support mods on the forum.

Same issues on my two pc with Win 10 1803.17134.320 and BIS 23.0.10.31...this update was a really buggy one. Hope they will fix it soon

TheHaggis

I loved 2018 TS. But 2019 TS, yikes, BAD & SLOW, sluggish UI, settings that will not stay, recommendations will not go away. Blah. Please patch this soon. I may have to start looking for another solution, I can't deal with this.

palace

Have completely uninstalled BD and did a reinstall just to give it a second chance. It did fix up the issue where it wouldn't save any of the settings, but it still slows apps, and browsing. Memory usage is nearly 500MB and disk does get hammered more. Removed again and am now trialing Kaspersky. Memory usage is only around 70MB, with a slight increase with full scan. Performance is good. It my have it's own issues yet to be seen but at least the performance has increased significantly over BD. Unless BD acknowledge there is an issue and fix things I will definitely be moving away from it.

Danny_4

This thread - and others - regarding BD 2019 issues seems to be completly useless. Scores of people have been complaining about issues following the upgrade, from performance to functionality, and nothing gets done.

I've been working as a software engineer for many years for multiple companies, and I know that if any of our customers would've had the sort of issues reported, the entire SW and QA departments would've worked around the clock to get them fixed, but it seems that in the case of BitDefener engineeing they're either incapable of fixing the issues in a timely manner, or simply just don't care.

What a shame. I used to be a fan and advocate of this product.

boby44

I opened support ticket 4 days ago and they only answered that ticket is currently being reviewed . Nothing else since.

If they don't fix this soon I will request for refund !

Jay-Z

I opened a ticket 3 weeks ago and got a response last Friday reverting me back to the initial stage. I responded saying that I would not submit nor gather all the information I sen them in the past if they lost it on their end. I'm still waiting for a response. I dumped this garbage software tuesday night. Now my drives are fine without any issue, no system resource hogging across the board (not just firefox) nor any of the other B.S issues. I grabbed the trial version of Kaspersky Internet Security and am very happy. The fact that I can now Safely Remove my External Hard Drives is calming. I have to admit that I'm extremely P.O. and aggravated at how Bitdefender has dealt with us and these stupid issues. Good luck with a refund. I had nothing but an awesome experience with the 2018 version. Loved it. I wouldn't wish the 2019 version on anybody which is a shame.

SplittingDistant

The release of BD 2019 was clearly rushed because it simply isn't ready for general release - I feel like a Beta Tester whose had to pay for the privilege of testing this buggy software masquerading as a finished product.

We have bugs such as the 'constant HDD/SSD activity' issue might actually be causing damage to user's hardware - and it's frankly utterly astonishing that BD don't even seem to have acknowledged the seriousness of this, much less actually fixed the bug after several weeks. There's even a workaround for some users (restart the Windows Management Instrumentation Service after every reboot) which surely must be a solid pointer to the nature of the problem, but still no fix.

Even really dumb stuff has happened like abandoning the concept of Autopilot, but retraining the term for a totally different function - almost feels wilful in its disregard for users, users who collectively have probably spent tens of thousands of man hours working out for themselves that Autopilot doesn't mean what it used to, and now means something totally different. Why didn't BD just say that Autopilot has been replaced by (say) Auto-Recommender which makes recommendations about settings rather than enforcing them on the user, therefore giving users greater control. Doing that would certainly have saved me 3 hours of unnecessary work.

BD also have to provide more information to users about the progress of fixes - the level of information from support has been terrible - I know no company wants to admit that there's a problem with their product as user confidence is everything in the AV world, but there comes a point where the reputational damage being caused by the bugs becomes more problematic than being transparent about the bugs and the progress towards fixing them.

And nearly finally, bearing in mind the many many complaints on these forums about the 2019 product, why oh why can we not revert to BD 2018 products which were solid, and pretty much bug free. At least explain to us paying customers why you won't consider this as an option.

And definitely finally, a "Things that make you go Hmmm" thought. How come no review writers came across these issues when they were testing the product to write their reviews - makes you wonder two things:

How much effort goes into writing software reviews.

And / Or

Do the reviewers get exactly the same product that the customers get.

Cynical? Well, yes it is, but after the Volkswagen emission scandal (and others) is it any wonder that Joe Public is getting a little suspicious of corporate motives and actions?

Come on BD, do the right thing - fix the problems quickly or revert to 2018 products and for God's sake 'fess up to this mess before we all disappear to your competitors.

philectro

I agree, i had no problem with 2018.

While 2019 suffered from several bugs:

one that slowered all my computer.

one now with the eject of hdd.

Revert to previous version must be inside the UI if you take your customers as betatester.

Daethz

-Blocks and generally screws with and bugs out downloads and installs from any game related to Blizzard Entertainment and its launcher.

PeterW

Yes, please:

Do an auto-upgrade to BD2018 and don't dare to launch BD2019 untill -all- bugs and reported issues have been solved.

Indeed, there is no rush to 'update' to BD2019, unless BD wants to loose its customers.

Brush6136

Contrary to most of the posts to this thread I have previously used the product in 2016 and found it interfered too much then with other software and spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get them to co-exist. So this time I was a tad skeptical but at first all looked OK except it seemed a tad slow.

I'm currently victim to the constant disk access issue, plus earlier problems at the start (July when I signed up) and the "couldn't scan 90 password protected files legend" which is absolute poppycock as none of the files are protected - just feels like lazy s/w development practice to me.

I've now uninstalled the product and will over the next week or so rely on Windows Defender (shock horror!) but in 45 years of computing use (before PC's) I've never had a virus on any machine I've owned. Don't think this is down to luck but care and not launching stuff willy nilly. I may end up going back to Kaspersky, bit conservative but it works.

If the 2018 version was so much better then I'd be happy to try that and agree with the comments about Bitdefender's reticence to open up about these issues. The latest reply I had to my service ticket (which is a month old) was 2 days ago and no indication that this is a common problem:-

"By now, there’s a high chance that the issue you raised was either fixed via automatic updates or is simply not relevant anymore to you; however, we would like to know where you stand. If you still need our help please let us know and we’ll engage promptly."

A few hours ago I got an answer to my reply to the above saying I'd taken some steps to mitigate the problem and that now it's a known issue! They really don't have a clue. I presume there must have been some major changes in the team that is responsible for development, because I can't imagine that a team with a really good product simply implodes so quickly. What is going on Bitdefender?

The other message to impart which others have said, is trust your customers. If you opened up more about known issues you'd then have at least the respect of your customers and who knows you might get to fix things more quickly because of their involvement. At the moment it's very much is it me or the product? Finding out it's the product makes you feel a bit better (shared pain) but angry too about the wasted time including that of Bitdefender staff. Message to management - get a grip and manage.

palace

I have to admit that I've been going to & fro between BD and others a few times. I too recently received an email about a ticket I lodged back in July. It's one I followed up a number of times all without success. They did apologise and added 6 months to the subscription so some brownie points for that. I tried out Kaspersky and while it seemed to perform a bit better and uses way less memory, it too had some issues especially navigating to https sites where it would take ages to load up. It's Outlook plugin also didn't seem to work. Avast also doesn't look like it's improved it's game since I last used it.

It's obvious the auto update from BD2018 to 2019 was less than successful, so what I did was completely removed BD2019 (for the second time) and cleaned out every trace from the registry ,ProgramData, AppData etc, and did a fresh install from Central. Not sure if they've made some tweaks or updated the version but it has fixed the long standing issue with the Outlook 2016 plugin and disk access seem to be minimal. We'll see how things go after a few scans reboots etc. Mem usage is still higher than some of the other competing products.

I think BD's biggest problem is not being vocal or open enough. They would surely know of the vast number of complaints, so even a quick notification or email saying they've seen the comments and are looking into it would be good. You need to have good customer relations if you want to have a good product to follow.

jktorres28

Yeah I've had too many issues with this software, seems like every year they release their new products there is always issues for a while, before they sort most them out. This one I think has been by the far the worst. Just ended up installing Kaspersky, and all everything seems to be working well and how it's supposed to work, not sure I'll be coming back to this again.

boby44

Currently I tried everything that support suggested through ticket I opened and nothing fixed this issue.

Nevertheless I found that my PC starts to slow down after I opened Firefox. So the thing is that after I uninstall Bitdefender 2019 and install it again, everything seems to be working fine. Programmes are open fast, like normaly do. But after I click to open Firefox, all starts to slowdown. No matter I close Firefox, all is slow.

So again I uninstalled BD and waiting further instructions from support who asked me to send diagnostic data from their diagsnostic tool.

unknown

We have new build - 23.0.11.48

Can we see what changes this version have?

Thank you!

Brush6136

You're obviously guessing here and not working on definitive information about the state of this build.

I have previously installed and uninstalled this version I've just discovered it still has the disk access issue. However I'm not aware of any way I can determine what the current build I'm downloading from my Central account before I install or is there some way of doing so before I download?

I've just wasted around half an hour of my time going through this and will spend a further 15 minutes uninstalling again. Not happy. Surely the release info about a build refers to the fixes made and you should be aware of this rather than wasting my time like this?

Methinks other action is necessary here to get Bitdefender to behave in a reasonable fashion towards its customers.