WinPatrol News and Updates

I have been feeling very negligent because I have not provided Security Garden readers with information on the latest updates that Bill Pytlovany has made to WinPatrol. I am going to remedy that with this post.

The first change was the minor update earlier this month when version 12.0.2007.5 was released. For long-time WinPatrol users who missed the original Scotty icon in the system tray, this version includes a new option that allows you to select the original black Scotty icon.

Several days later, Bill provided an explanation of the WinPatrol feature for protecting file type associations. One of the most widely viewed pages here at Security Garden is the tutorial on recovering from the Ad-Watch setting that can kill .LNK and .EXE File Extensions. There are no such problems with WinPatrol. See Don't Change My File Type Associations and the follow-up post, Show File Types and Hidden Files.

Lastly, just announced today, is a New Win Patrol Plus Data Collection option being added to WinPatrol in order to increase the precision of the PLUS database. As Bill explains:

"To accomplish this, our new version (12.1.2007.5) will be collecting more data on requested programs. This is strictly information on the file and not the user. Typical data sent will incude version, company name, install path, file date, file size and date detected. The results will be better detection of rootkits and other more devious attacks. It will also help detect outdated system files which may create unstable versions of Windows. (Something which has caused me grief recently)

This will be an “Opt-in” decision for both free and PLUS WinPatrol users. By default, this option will be off. By checking the option users give permission for their data to be used to improve our results.

Users can participate or not by downloading our newest version at http://www.winpatrol.com/download.html"

I don't suppose I need to tell you that I installed the latest version of WinPatrol, clicked the Options tab and checked the "Allow Plus Info data collection".


References:

• Minor WinPatrol release news
• Don't Change My File Type Associations
• Show File Types and Hidden Files
• New Win Patrol Plus Data Collection

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