BitDefender for DOS Review

Courtesy of the alt.comp.virus newsgroup participants.
(These "anti-malware" pages are the result of a continuing cooperative effort.)

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This is an update to our previous review of the DOS version of the BitDefender anti-virus program. It can be downloaded for free from http://www.bitdefender.com/html/bd_ms_dos.php. You will also find a list of system requirements there.

Unfortunately the previous version was plagued by a number of problems that made the program very inconvenient to use. The purpose of this review is to verify whether those issues have been resolved.

Soft- and hardware used for the test:

BDC/Win32-Console i386 v6.5.2 (Oct 29 2002 13:04:28)
Engine signatures : 67712
Scan engines : 10
Archive engines : 34
Unpack engines : 2
Mail engines : 6
System engines : 0

Windows 98 SE (German). The tests were conducted in the DOS box.

Pentium III processor, 500 MHz, 256 MB RAM

1. DOS programs versus Windows console programs

The archive bdcdos.zip, judging by its name, should contain a DOS program but actually contains a Windows console program. Console applications are genuine Windows programs with the appearance of DOS programs (i.e. without a graphical user interface) and they do not work in plain DOS. An attempt to run such a program under plain DOS will results in the message

This program cannot be run in DOS mode.

being displayed on the screen. Such programs do however work in a DOS box under Windows because, as said above, they are effectively Windows programs.

Softwin (the company that produces BitDefender for DOS) should carefully deliberate on whether a Windows program can be distributed in the guise of a DOS program.

2. Screen display.

When run with the "/?" parameter which notifies the program to display a help screen with possible options, or without any parameters, it displays its entire list of switches without pausing after a whole screen has been filled.
This can be circumvented by using the DOS "| more" command but it certainly would be more convient if the program paused automatically when necessary.

The program strangely does not display all characters in the same color as illustrated by the following screen shots:

When the program displays its help screen (as a result of invoking it either with the "/?" parameter or without any parameters at all) without the "| more" command, it will behave similarly:

In case the "| more" command is not used, there are no such color discrepancies in the help screen. This is obviously only a minor cosmetical problem but more consistency would certainly be desirable. For those readers who are not familiar with DOS or the "| more" command, let it be said that this command does not in any way influence screen colors. The problem therefore lies with BitDefender.

3. Evaluation of command line parameters

Unfortunately, the very first screen shot above as well as the following screen shot both demonstrate that the program's handling of command line parameters is poor:

(Please note that the screen shot was artificially cut off on the right, but the warning message is irrelevant to the matter at hand.)

4. Updating the program

How to update the program? There is a "Free Products" section on BitDefender's update page, which offers the following choices:

The fact that updates are offered for version 7 of the product is rather confusing because the program identifies itself as version 6.5.2. (Note: this is not new. This was already criticized in our previous review.)

The cumulative update comprises all updates until the release date and at the time of testing was 2333 KB large. That update should apparently be downloaded every Monday; given its large size this is cumbersome especially for users with slow Internet connections. After the latest cumulative update was applied the program displayed the following information when asked to:

Engine signatures : 68063
Scan engines : 10
Archive engines : 34
Unpack engines : 2
Mail engines : 6
System engines : 0

That is rather odd since according to the screen shot above, which was made at the same time, there should be only 68022 signatures.

A new daily update is made available every day. On the day this review was written the daily archive was an incredible 1529 KB large! Imagine that on a dial-up connection.

5. Conclusion

The only realm where this product has improved is stability. The previous version used to crash seemingly randomly; this has not happened this time.

Unfortunately the program still suffers from many severe flaws that had already been pointed out by our previous review, plus it seems to have contracted at least one other nasty habit, which is to use inconsistent screen colors.
Softwin should also definitely do away with the unfathomable version system. Is it 6.5.2 or 7.0? Is it the DOS version or Windows console version? It doesn't matter, for the time being you probably won't want to use it anyway...

Review history:
Original review - June 4, 2002