One can never be too secure. On the other hand, Bitdefender Internet Security has everything you need to protect your computer system. And with its AutoPilot feature, you can let it choose for you every security decision to be made so you can occupy yourself in more important matters.

Installation

Bitdefender offers one of the more customizable installations among security suites, but that benefit comes with a tedious process that takes a couple of steps. You can’t leave the keyboard as it installs everything either, since some steps require user input in, for instance, creating a Bitdefender account and choosing security components to turn on or off. The whole setup lasted only a few minutes, which is apparently shorter than installing an older version of the software.

Interface

If you own the 2012 security suite, then you may notice only a minimal change in the user interface design. As such, Bitdefender has quite an attractive layout: a colored banner indicates how protected your computer system is, specific safeguarding measures are divided into smaller modules, and the overall interface makes use of a dark, simplistic theme. The Events log has its own button and lets you view a record of recent security events in your system.

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Right beside Events is the equally prominent Settings button, which lets you conveniently customize the antivirus, privacy, firewall, and update modules, among other features. The available configurations are aplenty, although they shouldn’t be too intimidating to the average computer user. In fact, Bitdefender provides a simple arrangement of the options and only shows more sophisticated settings when users opt for the advanced settings view. When things get too complicated, the Help & Support is located to the lower right corner of every screen. Through it, messages pop up and explain what each setting is supposed to do. If the options are still too overwhelming to explore, users can actually just leave them in their default state and Bitdefender can do just fine in its everyday security responsibilities.

Performance

Bitdefender Antivirus belongs to the less popular brands of security software, but its performance and effectiveness are topnotch. Quick system scans only last within five minutes, while complete scan times fare around one to two hours.

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In a February 2013 assessment of numerous security software, AVTest.org gave Bitdefender a perfect score in protection. During the independent IT-security institute’s testing, Bitdefender was able to block all incoming zero-day malware attacks and detected all widespread and prevalent malware. It also garnered a perfect score in usability, given that it gave no false positives in blocking websites and valid programs. As per the assessment, the only drawback to this otherwise excellent software was in performance due to its negative influence on computer speed in daily usage. But in that aspect, Bitdefender still ranked third best among all evaluated security products.

As the security suite is a big program, an impact to the system performance and resources is indeed expected. Boot time, for example, is delayed for a minute and shutting down the computer takes up to 15 seconds more. In comparison to an unprotected system, computers with Bitdefender installed perform a bit slower during media multitasking, video and audio decoding, and data transfers. Nevertheless, the slowdown is minimal and still better than in other security suites.

Extras

Besides basic protection against malware, such as viruses, Trojans, and keyloggers, Bitdefender Internet Security includes additional features. The Bitdefender Safego tool, for instance, is now bundled with the software package and protects users from spam and e-threats as they peruse Facebook news feeds. Support for the Twitter social network is also planned. When there’s a major security compromise that can’t be removed through the usual means, a Rescue mode lets users boot into a specialized Linux OS where Bitdefender can perform a more intensive, unhindered cleaning.

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For those looking for a great antispam solution, Bitdefender’s spam filtering performs quite well and only fails to detect a few junk messages. Users can also appreciate the fact that it very rarely mislabels personal messages or legit bulk emails as spam, so there’s no need to worry of missing important communications in their inbox. The two-way firewall, on the other hand, functions by blocking potential hack attacks. It does the task silently and decides on its own on how to control every program with ingoing and outgoing Internet data. For parents who want to set restrictions in their children’s use of the computer, a cloud-based parental control is also available. Parents can specify rules and limits through an online portal, which the local Bitdefender installation retrieves and implements. Up to 30 content categories are available to filter out.

As it is, Bitdefender Internet Security already has a lot of bells and whistles, although the complete Bitdefender Total Security 2013 package adds more components such as online backup, device anti-theft, file encryption, and system tune-up. If you can live without these named features, then Internet Security should suffice your security needs.

Wrap-up

Bitdefender Internet Security 2013 comes with a simple user interface and yet offers a complete security protection, along with added features. If you can ignore the little annoyances, such as the rather tedious installation process and the negligible system performance impact, then this security suite is perfect for you. Admittedly, it isn’t the most effective in any of its features, but Bitdefender is overall one of the best high-end security suites out there.

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