OMG, so darn slow for Daily & or all Bitdefender Security Updates & I mean SLOW! It's literally driving me crazy seeing & dealing with this every day at these continuing SLOW crawl Speeds which are not improving.

Bitdefender Security Products are one of the slowest Security Products to update their Products & Daily Virus Definition Updates. It takes 9 Minutes or longer at times with my Wired 400+ Mbps Broadband Internet Connection to let & get my Bitdefender Total Security 2024 to update & complete its Daily Security & Product Updates from the Bitdefender Security Servers. This kind of dreadful, SLOW Updates from a very popular Security Product is just lame & really needs to be worked on & greatly improved here soon or in the near future of all of their Security Products.

No other Internet Security Software out there that I have purchased or used on my Desktop Computer in the past has been Bitdefender most definitely needs to focus & work on improving & making their Daily Security & Product Updates and Update Servers respond & work better & faster than they are now... I feel like their Updates are in Turtle Mode or slower! This terribly SLOW at Daily Updating... Also, Bitdefender Total Security has been taking & using a lot of my Computers System Resources heavily at times too & making my Computer slow to boot & startup which is also a concern and a annoyance. I am not so sure that I will purchase & take on another Bitdefender Product for these noticeable & noted reasons that I am experiencing & dealing with Daily?

I was under the impression Bitdefender was one of the leaders in the AV world and wanted to protect my network, and my devices. I was satisfied with the trial but didn't run into any issues during that time. I decided to purchase the software subscription and saws Best Buy had it pretty cheap. So I purchased it and after a week or so, I noticed that bitdefender would alert me whenever an application was trying to access my microphone.

Cool, I thought, I'll use bitdefender to block access to the microphone for a game I play because there's a bug with the game where audio will still broadcast even with the setting turned off in the game. So I decided to go look through the logs and see what port was being accessed so I could block it and prevent my conversations from being broadcasted to the game. After searching I realized...

...there are no logs. Anywhere. Want to see what Bitdefender is doing in the background? Tough luck. I decided to reach out to Bitdefender support to see if I was missing something and received responses from an engineer that was quite possibly the worse customer service I've had to deal with.

Instead of helping me find a solution, they told me to purchase a more expensive business version of their product. Which is absolutely ridiculous. In order to see what it's doing to MY pc, I have to pay more money? Welp, refund time, right? (I mean I've literally only had the product for 2 weeks.)

No. Wrong.

Zero options for refunds. Best Buy policy prohibits refunds due to it being a digital item and Bitdefender refuses to refund due to it being purchased from Best Buy. You literally have no recourse if you purchase this product from Best Buy and have ANY kind of issue with the software.

So can I recommend? Absolutely not. Had I known what I know, I would've just purchased the AntiVirus option instead of 'Total Security.' Much cheaper and their AV is what is world renown, not their security suite. (Which is practically useless on iOS devices, but that's another story.)

So no. I would not buy Bitdefender Total Security and would not purchase any Bitdefender products from Best Buy if I had known any of this. You'll have zero options if you're dissatisfied with the service, product, or anything else. Their customer service is horrendous and their product has no transparency. There's no way to see what it's doing on your computer. It's just unacceptable in my opinion.

I'm using this successfully on Windows PCs and an Android phone. I haven't had any major security events, but this seems to be working as well as advertised and evaluated by the various testing labs. There seems to be a minimal impact on system resources, and it's unobtrusive unless notifying you of an event, unlike many of its competitors who constantly try to upsell and cross-sell their other services. It does display on-screen notifications when you try something that one of the optional services works with, but you can disable these easily in the settings, and the software respects your choices. Overall, I'm quite happy with how it works, and how well it stays in the background without interrupting your computing experience. That alone makes it better for me than competing products with similar levels of protection.

I'm just a typical user, so I have no way of knowing how good this really is at protecting my computer. BUT, I looked at several 'professional' reviews and most rank this product at or near the top. So...apparently it's a good bet. NOW...in real life use....it does like to pop up and give many warnings about potentially dangerous websites and ask if you want to continue. This happens on many sites that I have used for years with not problem (eg banking, amazon, clubs, etc). So I find that overly intrusive, but you can just click 'proceed anyway'. Still it's annoying. My former Webroot did not do that. In summary....I expect this works well as the pro's have reported but DO be ready for lots of annoying warning pop up boxes. That's why I only gave it 4 instead of 5 stars.