Bitdefender 2020 Antivirus Review

The Bitdefender antivirus offer is accurate and reliable and is full of valuable additional features.

The consumer product line starts with Bitdefender Antivirus Free Edition, a simple Windows tool that focuses primarily on the most important security principles: virus protection, phishing blocking and other fraud sites, and that’s it.

Bitdefender Antivirus Plus is a first-class commercial product that, as you may have guessed by name, offers many useful security and privacy extras: an additional level of ransomware protection, Wi-Fi security scanning to detect network problems, security Banking through a secure browser, secure file deletion, a vulnerability scanner and a password manager.

What’s new in Bitdefender 2020 is an anti-tracker browser extension for Windows and Mac that allows you to detect and block a variety of web crawlers to protect your privacy and possibly improve page load times.

Bitdefender Internet Security extends the package with a firewall, a spam filter and parental controls. You can use webcam protection to block unauthorized access to your webcam. A new microphone monitor indicates which applications are accessing your microphone.

Bitdefender Total Security is a leader in the product line and offers tools for cleaning and optimizing devices, as well as applications for Mac, Android and iOS devices, as well as for Windows. It is a great advantage and only slightly more expensive than Internet Security. With $ 45 in the first year, up to five devices can be covered.

Bitdefender Antivirus Plus 2020 can be installed quickly, easily and to a large extent automatically. We highlighted, clicked and, in a matter of minutes, the reassuring message “Bitdefender was installed correctly” told us it was time to start.

Bitdefender also had our test system equipped with many new background processes, services, controllers and a host of other discrete functions. It is not uncommon for an antivirus program, but it can cause problems if performance is affected.

But there has been better news with our self-protection results in which we tested security applications to see if they could be disabled by malware. We tried to close the processes, stop the services, download the drivers, change the configuration and do everything possible to break the package, but Bitdefender Antivirus Plus repelled our attacks and continued as usual.

Bitdefender Antivirus Plus 2020 supports several scanning modes. Fast scanning verifies infected areas more frequently and system scanning verifies everything. In addition, the File Explorer integration allows you to scan objects using the Explorer context menu, and there is a boot rescue environment that helps you eliminate the most stubborn threats.

Bitdefender antivirus configuration does not match the configurability of some geek level competitors, but they are well qualified and focus on the features you need most.

It has no intimidating possibilities and too much techniques to scan RAR files to a nesting depth of 4, but for example no TAR: there are only the “usual scan files, yes or no?” Marco.

However, in an unusual way, you can control whether Bitdefender analyzes incoming and outgoing emails, ignores only incoming, outgoing emails or completely ignores emails. This could be very useful.

The default scan speed is reasonable. Fast scans take approximately 15 to 30 seconds on our test computer. Regular analyzes started a bit slowly at 25 minutes to verify 50 GB of files. On the second pass, this time it fell to less than six minutes and on the third pass, the sweep time was only 67 seconds.

The scan engine is smart enough to be able to perform simultaneous scans without any problem. For example, if you run a longer complete system scan, you can also perform an on-demand scan for a recently downloaded download or any other operation. A window opens showing the results of your second scan while the first scan continues to run in the background.

The total sum of this is a polished set of malware-hunting tools which go well beyond the basics, but remain easy to use for not-so-technical types. Experts might wish there were a few more fine-tuning options, but in general Bitdefender gets the configurability balance right.