December 2021 Bitdefender Free is going
Sorry to bother you twice in one month – normally twice in one year is a lot for me – but something has come up that might be bothering a few of you, that I need to address.
BitDefender, the antivirus that I have wholeheartedly recommended for the last 5 years or so, is pulling the plug on their free version. The paid for version is fine. This is pretty devastating as there has been no warning that I have seen, other than an email out of the blue this week, which many of you may have received. They are stopping providing the free version to new users at the end of this year – and ending support to existing users of it next June. So, there is no rush to do anything, but they are offering a very good deal to existing Free users, that being an upgrade to the bought version for £8.98 for the first year. That upgrade is good for 5 computers too, so it is pretty much an unbeatable offer, at least for that first year. That offer expires at the end of this year, so be quick if you want to go that way. I (and most of the review sites that I trust) still wholeheartedly recommend BitDefender if you are buying an anti-virus.
If you want to take advantage of the aforementioned offer, and don’t know your login details then you might find them in the “Compulogix Read Me” file I often leave on the desktop. Or you could start BitDefender and then click the cog at the top right and select Account Information and see where that leads.
I have just looked and it seems that as of the time of writing this, you can still download and install Bitdefender Free – so even if you don’t use BitDefender it might be worth thinking about downloading and installing the free version now (here’s a link), and then hopefully getting the upgrade option for £8.98 to the full version – I’m not positive that this will work for long, but you never know.
So as a result of this, I’ve just been having a hunt around for a replacement suggestion for a good free antivirus and it seems that perhaps the best free one is now Kaspersky (available here if you want/need it)
I hope that is reasonably clear and apologise in particular to those who have recently taken advantage of the free version of Bitdefender in recent months due to my recommendation.