Bitdefender AV Free Reviewed

Bitdefender AV Free was first released about 6 years ago, and I reviewed it at that time in this forum. Cloud AV protection was a fairly new concept, and I found it to be a promising technology. I thought it worth a second review when I noticed how well Bitdefender Internet Security (the paid version) has consistently ranked at the top in testing at independent sites in recent years. At AV-Comparatives, it was the 2018 "Oustanding Product Award" winner, and the 2017 "Product of the Year". It has been awarded the highest "Advanced+" status in every AV-C test conducted over the last 5 years, an achievement not equalled by any other product. Over at AV-Test, it was awarded "Best Protection for Consumers" in 2018 (tied with other products), "Best Performance" (i.e. least drain on resources) in 2018 (also tied), "Best repair" (tied), and has had perfect protection scores in the last 15 tests since August 2016. Whew!

Now these tests all applied to the paid suite, not BD Free AV. However the experts say that the basic scanning engines are the same in both versions, and the basic protection against real-time threats should be identical. Bitdefender claims that the Free version has the following features:
- Active Threat Control for detecting suspicious activity
- On-access scanning for real-time protection
- Web Protection for detecting/blocking malicious websites.
- In-the-cloud scanning that has zero impact on system performance

Test Platform:
- Win 7 Pro-x64/sp1
- Dell Latitude E5410 laptop, 2.4 gHz Intel i5, 4 GB RAM, plugged in, hard connected to internet
- System also protected with Malwarebytes 3 Premium, and has never been compromised by malware AFAIK.

Download and Installation:

Downloading installer (bitdefender_online.exe), 10 MB, from bitdefender, went smoothly in about 5 s, from:
https://www.bitdefender.com/solutions/free.html

Version: 1.0.15.89 (390 MB) downloaded in about 6 minutes. No piggybacked software was included, BUT ...
Malwarebytes 3 was detected as installed, was "possibly incompatible" and I was required to uninstall it before BD would finish installing. There was no getting by this, not even by deleting its real-time protection. So I uninstalled MB3 (but see below for resolution). Next I was informed I would have to uninstall Spywareblaster(! ) for the same reason. Why a passive program like Spywareblaster was targeted is without justification.  To complete the installation I had to register an account (first and last name, email address) with Bitdefender. Several reboots, an installer screen, an EULA acceptence later ... What with the uninstallations thrown in, it took me the better part of one hour to install this AV. Needless to say, not an auspicious introduction to this AV.

Usage:
Only one System scan is offered on the GUI. No short scan, no full scan, no scan scheduler. To scan a single file or folder, you can drag and drop it into the interface, or scan from a right-click context menu. The initial System scan took about 58 minutes. Subsequent System scans took about 3-5 minutes, so caching of scan info was heavily used.
A user guide, complete with screen shots,  can be downloaded from:
https://download.bitdefender.com/windows/bp/Bitdefender_AntivirusFree_2016_en.pdf?adobe_mc=MCMID%3D70817799747075265892458920285688097833%7CMCORGID%3D0E920C0F53DA9E9B0A490D45%2540AdobeOrg%7CTS%3D1553406521

One anomaly was that I could not use Google Search using Firefox. I would get an alert "Did Not Connect: Potential Security Issue". This was clearly due to Bitdefender, since disabling its real-time protection eliminated this alert. I'm not a fan of Google Software, and wonder if this represents protection against a real Google threat. Google Search worked well in my other browsers. Go figure.

Configuration:
This is absolutely the most simple AV I have tested, with almost nothing to configure. Simpler than Windows Defender or Sophos Home. It is a "fire and forget" AV, which might appeal to the less tech savvy out there. Basically you get to turn on or off the real-time protection shield, and that is about it. In the Settings>Account Info> you will probably want to turn off the "Display notifications with special offers" option (basically ads popping up to upgrade to the paid version, turned on by default) and the "Send Anonymous usage reports". Detected malware is automatically quarantined, which might cause problems with false positive system files. Quarentined files can be restored.

Support:
As a free AV product, no phone support is provided. There is a community support forum here:
https://forum.bitdefender.com/index.php?/forum/356-bitdefender-antivirus-free-edition/

Impressions:
I am disappointed in Bitdefender Free. It promised so much protection, but caused me so much grief during installation and browser searches. It is certainly a simple AV. It was very territorial in banning both Malwarebytes and Spywareblaster, for absolutely no good reason. For those reasons alone I cannot recommend Bitdefender Free AV. Of course, YMMV.