Hello. I installed bitdefender free antivirus software a few months ago, and today I decided to uninstall it. My computer worked perfectly this morning, btw. When I chose to uninstall it kept popping up with “are you sure?”, “Hackers will have access to your sensitive information”, and “at least tell us why”. I ignored the obvious promo pop-ups and uninstalled. My computer suddenly slowed to a snails pace. I checked the task manager and it said 100% hard drive is being used, and wouldn’t you know it…there were 5 bitdefender processes running. I contacted the company via chat and they said I needed to use their “special” uninstaller, and although wary I did so. It removed only 2 of the running processes. I then googled a bunch of different remedies, one of which was to log in as administer and take ownership of the bitdefender files…but apparently bitdefender out ranks even the admin of the computer. “Access Denied”
So now I have a worthless computer, all because I didn’t buy their crap.
Does anyone know the proper channels to go through to report and investigate this company?
Does anyone have any ideas on how to reclaim my computer?
At least I would like a list of reputable sites to post my review in order to hopefully save some other people from loosing their computers as well.
I would use F-Secure as an alt antivirus but as of removing it you could try Ccleaner, it has a utility to forcefully uninstall installed programs and that could work.
Thanks for the tips! Luckily my husband found out how to reset the computer to factory settings and that worked. Thankfully I only use that laptop for music composition and only started using it recently, so I lost very little in the way of files.
It’ll just take awhile to reinstall my programs and get rid of the original stuff I don’t want or need.
I know AV companies need to be thorough to keep your computer from getting infected, but it feels to me like they are becoming a type of virus themselves. We should be able to do a complete uninstall ourselves if we want, and if security is the issue (we don’t know if it’s really you deleting our program) then surly some form of password or two factor authentication could be implemented?
I dunno as I’m not a programmer, but I would think that would be doable
Note that you can’t just take the ownership of /kill tasks of reputable antiviruses. They do that to make sure that in the event of a virus attack the virus cannot simply end antivirus tasks or delete antivirus files EVEN IF IT HAS ADMINISTRATIVE PRIVILEGES. You don’t want the antivirus to be as useless as an infected computer, right?
PS: Don’t be offended as I am not scolding you.
