BitDefender Total Security 2012 - Review

Back on the 17th of this month I took a look at the beta version of BitDefender Total Security 2012 and I have to say that I wasn’t impressed at all. There were a few reasons for this but the main one by far was the fact that the program reduced my laptop to a crawl. Or should I say complete and utter standstill.

The Good:

• Massive improvement over the beta version
• Auto-pilot feature requires less input from the user
• Large range of features

The Bad:

• Large amount of RAM required
• Interface: white text on a black background is a personal no-no
• Some people have reported that installation can be slow

Still, I said at the time that I do like BitDefender products and that I thought they would come good in the end. So today I am taking another look, this time at the final retail version.

Now I’m not going to run through everything again as all the features, system requirements and positive and negative points are all covered in my previous review. Instead I’m just going to look at the big area that concerned me previously, namely the resource usage.

Well, as I thought there might, there has been a huge turnaround. With the beta the CPU usage was constantly between around 25% and 80% with the higher figure being more typical. As you can see above, it is much, much lower now which leads to a far more pleasant experience!
With this final retail version of BitDefender running on my laptop I can actually do other things whilst a scan is in progress. I don’t know why the beta was so poor on my machine. Sure, betas are not expected to be perfect but all the others I have tried in the past have been fairly close to the final versions, albeit with a few minor bugs that needed to be discovered.
The BitDefender Total Security 2012 beta was poor indeed on my machine, for whatever reason, but the final build doesn’t suffer from that at all. The plus points I mentioned in the previous outing still stand and the negative points have ceased to be an issue.

Conclusion
Whilst there was no way on earth I would have recommended trying out the beta version of this product I am glad to say that the final retail version is as good as previous versions and lives up to what I would expect to see from this security vendor. I’m happier now and actually looking forward to reviewing BitDefender’s 2012 antivirus program shortly
Do you want to see what the other vendors are offering this year? If so, read my other 2012 Internet Security reviews.