April 2022 Bitdefender Change of Heart

Bitdefender – Again!

Sorry for any confusion this might cause, but it seems that Bitdefender has had a change of heart regarding a free antivirus product. They haven’t quite got around to announcing it yet but I thought I’d let you know in case some of you were still wondering what to do.

Whilst they stated that their old free product would end at the end of 2021, they did in fact decide to let it run on for 6 months (if it was installed prior to the end of last year), so many of you might not have noticed. They still aren’t making it particularly easy to find the new Free version but if you want to have a go yourself, then you can find it by going to their website (bitdefender.co.uk) and hovering (don’t click!) your mouse over the For Home button at the top of the page. You should see a list of products come up and, on that list, will be Bitdefender Antivirus Free which you can click and it should offer the option to download the installation software, which you can then run.

If you are thinking of changing from something else (apart from the inbuilt Windows Antivirus) to Bitdefender Antivirus Free then you should uninstall what you currently have before running the downloaded BitDefender file and following the instructions it provides.

A direct link to the download page can be found here.

Once installed, you will see that this version of Bitdefender Antivirus Free is a little bit different from the old one. It used to be a fairly innocuous little box with few options, but it is now much more like the paid for version, which will probably result in some confusion, as many of the buttons will lead you towards the paid version. I would also bet that there will probably be more annoying messages than the old one used to produce, but the software is still about as good as you can get for free.

OK that’s if from me. If you need any help with this, you know where to find me.