View of Screen for BullGuard Internet Security 10
When representatives of BullGuard approached me in early December for a review of their program, I told them I needed at least a month of using the program before I could judge how effective it was.
So far, so good.
I’ve been running it on my Windows 7 desktop with no problems and, most importantly, no virus attacks.
I also installed it on the eldest daughter’s desktop, which uses Windows XP Professional Edition. She’s had serious problems with viruses in the past and none of the free services–Avast and Malwarebytes– have protected her from infections, nor has sticking to Firefox as her browser instead of Internet Explorer been effective against the occasional virus.
What she needed, I guessed, was active anti-virus protection that blocked viruses before they got into her system rather than trying to root them out after the fact. That seems to only be available in paid anti-virus programs.
Download and installation of BullGuard was simple and took about fifteen minutes. As you can see of the screen-shot above, all the various services area available from one screen.
In the time I’ve been using BullGuard, I’ve not had one virus issue on the Windows 7 PC. The only small problem I had with my version of BullGuard is a small, niggling one. I have too much data for the BullGuard back-up and it asks me several times a day whether I want to upgrade to another version of the program. I did ask in their support section about this problem and was helped within an hour.
A six week trial period without viruses doesn’t definitely prove that BullGuard is perfect but I certainly feel my PC is safer, especially since my younger daughter plays on-line games on this desktop.
I have somewhat negative proof that BullGuard works from the Windows XP PC.
My eldest forgot to enter the license key to continue her BullGuard service after the one-month trial. Within two weeks, she had a virus. I don’t believe this is a coincidence as she’s had continual issues with viruses over the past year, those stopped when we installed BullGuard, and started up again when the trial period was over.
I take this as evidence that the active anti-virus protection was working.
The virus (a version of the anti-virus live virus) prevented my daughter from even connecting to the internet and from re-activating BullGuard. We tried running Malwarebytes in safe mode (the free version) and a couple of system restores but couldn’t get it off the computer. Eventually, I went to another service that I’d tested for GeekMom, Tech Support For Dummies. They were able to get her computer running free of virus and, incidentally, raised my positive view of that service.
But all that took hours over the course of several days. I’d much rather have paid for a program to prevent it in the first place and BullGuard seems quite capable of that.
It also offers, as can be seen from the screenshot, comes with anti-spyware, a spamfilter, firewall protection, and the back-up that I mentioned. As promised on the website, I found it very user-friendly and easy to run. I can’t say if it works better than, say, the paid version of Malwarebytes but I’d happily spend my money on BullGuard to avoid the time and frustration of dealing with virus issues.
