When I recently convinced some family members to get BitDefender, I discovered that v2008 was available. I went to http://kb.bitdefender.com/KB387-en--Upgrad...virus-2008.html
which said:
"Your current registration license for a previous version of BitDefender Antivirus v10 and BitDefender Standard v9 was upgraded to BitDefender Antivirus 2008 for the remaining licensing period. Upgrade your product now to benefit for free of the new features and enjoy the continued protection."
That pretty clearly states that all BitDefender 9 and 10 licenses have been upgraded to v2008 licenses for the remainder of their license periods, and that the upgrade was (and is) free.
However, after following the instructions given on that same page, I discovered that my v10 license does NOT work, and when I logged in to MyBitDefender page to get the upgraded code, I was asked for money (a bit over $18 for 1machine, and 20-something for 3) in order to get a code.
Since none of my support requests (sent from numerous accounts at hotmail, yahoo, google, and others, in case one or more was blocked) have even been acknowledged yet (after TWO WEEKS), I thought I'd take a quick peek at the web site again today to see if they'd fixed the conflict. And surprise! They tried.
But now the upgrade page I reference (which is still there) is no longer where you go when you click 'upgrade' on the BDAV 2008 product page. The new page says that for a limited time current v9/v10 users can upgrade for 25% off the regular price. That isn't bad (40-50% would be more polite to existing customers, but greed is universal) but when I log in to MyBitDefender and click on either RENEW or UPGRADE I'm offered the same prices for either: FULL PRICE. No hint of a discount. Not to mention that I currently have a TWO machine license, and there's no option to upgrade THAT.
These are COMPUTERS! Why is it so difficult to have them display the correct prices (and not incorrectly say things are free), adapted to my product. What's the point of the MyBitDefender stuff if they're not basing things like upgrade/renewal prices on exactly what you own. I only have two computers (desktop and laptop), why should I be forced to pay for THREE licenses(which costs $10 more than it did for my two).
And BEYOND the MIA BitDefender Support staff, v2008 has some bugs. It is rarely ever able to update. Typically it just stalls (until I kill it and reboot). Sometimes it says it cannot update while a scan is active -- even when the scan finished hours ago. And this afternoon, one of the bdupdate programs (I don't remember the exact name) ate 99% of my CPU until I killed it, and then update did nothing except show the pretty screen (with the printf formatting error "%%d") and hang until I rebooted.
It is also unacceptable to have a program unilaterally STEAL a key from other programs, especially without warning and an option to change/disable it. I'm talking about Alt+G (which eliminates a very common function from my favoriate text editor) to enter/exit Game Mode. I think Game Mode is a great thing, but I need to choose (or disable) the hotkey, and I'd prefer to have it automatically start when a registered game runs (similar to the way a firewall allows network access per application -- Game More should do the same thing to be TRULY helpful).
And lastly, one that isn't really a bug, just dumb: When a scheduled scan runs and encounters something that needs human intervention it stalls, waiting for the human. Since it hates one of my old email messages and cannot delete it itself, it waits for me to tell it to proceed every morning, then scans for another 10-15 minutes. It should have finished all scanning BEFORE promiting for a human or passed the "wait for human" info off to another thread/process. This behavior totally eliminates the usefulness of the scheduled scans -- especially since the updater won't run while the scan is waiting for a human response (that's how mine gets hung every day.
BitDefender has changed my system into one that requires booting every day -- just to clear BitDefender issues. I guess I should stop complaining and return to v10. It worked quite well.
PS: You might think I hate BD, but actually I'm just terribly disappointed because in the past they not only responded to support emails within hours, but typically completely resolved issues in that time. And, other than a million or so Generic.Peed notices popped up on my display, v10 has worked perfectly (and after I reported the problem, the next update fixed it, in under a day).