I have been a fairly contented user of Bullguard AV products for the last three years. My licence was up for renewal and for a variety of reasons I didn’t get round to renewing before the expiry date. No great issue you might think, I’ll be missing out on updates to the threat list, but otherwise that marginal increase in threat is something I can cope with.
Well, that’s what you’d expect from most software vendors, not so in the case of Bullguard. To my horror, on firing up my machine bullguard was no longer functioning – it had ceased to be. A very blatant pop-up appeared telling me that my licence had expired and I was no longer protected (very helpful) – but they’d DISABLED the entire bullguard suite on my machine. I therefore had NO active FIREWALL, nevermind a working (if somewhat behind) antivirus product.
What planet are these people on? This is taking software licencing to the extreme, and to be honest I don’t ever recall reading anything stating that after the licence period the bullguard AV suite is rendered useless and inoperative. No doubt I’ll have missed it in the smallprint, and they’re entirely within their “rights” to do this, but bullguard move to the fore in the category of least user friendly licencing model.
As I say, the product had been good (ignoring the age it took them to get a 64bit version working for Vista), and the support excellent, but on a point of principle I’m voting with my feet. Bullguard is no more; on my machines, I don’t want to boot up a machine one day to find out that yet again they have DISABLED the most critical software defense on my machine.
Bullguard – you really need to reconsider this approach!
