

The program itself couldn’t be easier to run. You will have to sign up for an account, but the only personal data you’ll need to provide is a name and email address. I was able to download and install the free version of Bitdefender in less than 5 minutes.

BitDefender Antivirus Free Edition 2016: performanceĪ scan of our 50GB file basket completed in 1 hour 18 minutes and evaluated 286,373 files, giving it a scan rate of 61 files per second, but a second scan took just 11s and scanned 10,183 files, so after the initial checks, Bitdefender looks very efficient at subsequent scans. There’s a fair degree of justification for this trust, as it scores remarkably well when tested. The flipside of this lack of control over settings is that it’s very easy just to load up and forget the software and trust that it will do its work and protect your PC. You can start a scan of specific files or folders from the BitDefender option in file menus, but again the progress of such a scan is shown only by the slowly changing border colour for the On Demand Scanner sub-panel which pops up. As far as we can see, there’s no way to instigate a full or quick scan you have to leave it to the automated protection features of the product to scan what it needs when it needs to.
