BitDefender Internet Security 2010 review

BitDefender Internet Security 2010 has plenty of features in addition to the usual spam filtering and firewall. Parental controls let you set different levels of web access for every user on the system, and it can use encryption to ensure the privacy of your Yahoo! Messenger and Windows Live chat sessions and protect confidential files stored in BitDefender's vault.

The firewall initially asks permission for every unrecognised program on your PC to connect to the internet. In one of our false positive tests, it defaulted to blocking an internet TV client, which rendered it unusable until we modified the firewall. It's not obvious how to do this in the basic Novice mode, which provides just a handful of options to update BitDefender or check your PC for viruses and vulnerabilities, or in Intermediate mode, which adds parental controls and an encrypted file vault. We preferred Expert mode, which provides a series of clearly labelled tabs that make it easy to configure every feature.

BitDefender has a noticeable effect on system performance even when it's just sitting in the background, and other programs were slow to respond when it was scanning or updating. It performed poorly when it came to instantly detecting and blocking web threats, managing this in only 50 per cent of our tests. However, it managed to neutralise most of the malware that it couldn't block, leaving behind only a handful of orphaned files that were incapable of harming our system unless they were run directly. It was compromised only twice. However, this performance is still worse than that of over half the other anti-malware software we tested against the same threats.

BitDefender provides a huge range of features for a very modest price, but its protection against web threats wasn't as complete as we'd like. If you just need basic anti-malware protection, Microsoft's free Security Essentials performed better in our tests. If you need a fully featured security suite, Kaspersky's Internet Security 2010 has a similar range of features and costs only a little more.

See page 2 for benchmark results.