WinPatrol 2010

Description

Every house needs a watchdog to warn you when something nasty is at the front door. And your PC is no different: it needs something that is ever-vigilant, keeping an eye on the programs running on your PC and making plenty of noise when something seems out of place.

WinPatrol does this guard job, keeping tabs on programs running on your PC (including the hidden ones) and alerting you if a program tries to install something unexpected, sets itself to run on startup, change your home page or install something it shouldn't. You can delete the offending programs, block their automatic startup or just monitor them to see what they do.

WinPatrol offers Delayed Start, a smart feature that helps Windows load faster. That's because Delayed Start gives you a way to force non-essential programs to launch up to an hour after the system boots. That's ideal for programs such as pop-up blockers or backup programs.

This free version of WinPatrol is fully functional, but There's a Plus version that has more features, including an online database of applications that provides more information. The database is very useful if you find a program running, but you don't know what it is. It also contains details of many of the major spyware programs that you want to avoid.