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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Nearly two and a half months ago, we published an update to our first review of the DOS version of the BitDefender anti-virus program which can be downloaded for free from http://www.bitdefender.com/html/bd_ms_dos.php. We found that while it had slightly improved over the first tested version, there were still a number of unresolved issues. The purpose of this second update is to verify what changes have been made to the version that was recently released.

Soft- and hardware used for the test:

BDC/DOS32-Console v7.0 (build 2420) (i386) (Jan 14 2003 16:23:17)
Engine signatures : 68689
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.

Athlon XP 2000+ processor, 256 MB RAM

1. Program versions

Previous versions of the program were advertised as version 7 on the web site but identified themselves as version 6.5.2. This version of the program now refers to itself as version 7 too.

In our last review, we found that the purported DOS program was actually a Windows console program. In this version, the program is a true DOS executable.

It's good to see that Softwin has introduced some consistency.

2. Screen display

Previous versions of the program used to rapidly display their list of possible command line switches. As a result the window scrolled very quickly, which made it impossible for the user to see the very first command line switches.
This problem has been resolved. The help screen in the current version is much neater and there is no more scrolling. Also, the color discrepancies that we noticed in the previous version have disappeared.

3. Stability, stability, stability

BitDefender for DOS has a very nasty habit of crashing a bit too often and without apparent reason. This very serious problem has still not been done away with in the new version as the following screen shot demonstrates:

4. Evaluation of command line parameters

The program's handling of command line parameters is still beneath contempt:

Our two previous reviews already pointed out that problem.

5. Conclusion

Some much needed improvements have been made to the program, but unfortunately the most serious problems still persist. We can't help but wonder why...

Review history:
Original review - June 4, 2002
2nd review - December 17, 2002