Monday, February 23, 2009

WinPatrol Beta Update With New Feature!

Having used WinPatrol for many years, when BillP talks about an updated version, I wonder how he can make WinPatrol better than it is already. Read on to learn about the latest improvement to WinPatrol and how it evolved.

Do you recall the Security Garden WinPatrol Challenge at WinVistaClub? As part of the Challenge, I included the option for WinVistaClub members to include any useful suggestion for improvement of WinPatrol or WinPatrol v16 Beta.

One member did just that. alsiladka had not used WinPatrol before but went ahead and gave it a try. The result? First read the suggestion that alsiladka submitted:
"I must be honest here. When i first installed it, the first glance at the UI and the layout was not very pleasing. It looked like another "StartUp Entries / ActiveX / BHOs" tweaker.

But Andy asked me to use it over the next few days and then form a judgement. And ain't i glad I did that! What a wonderful and helpful piece of software.

Getting straight to the feature suggestion, i have a suggestion which would turn this into an even formidable and a must have app.

As of now, we have to go to each tab to check the latest activity for that group. But can we have a Single feed or a live feed tab, where all the events are logged together, irrespective of their catagory, according to the time of happening? So that i can see what all changes took place in the system right after I installed software X, as all i need to do is look at that portion of the Main log which is right after the time i installed software X."
I passed the suggestion along to BillP. Here is the result in Bill's words:
"I’ve heard a lot of good comments and one suggestion was so valuable I couldn’t wait for a future release to make it available."
WinPatrol already tracks when a program, service, hidden file or registry entry is first detected. As a result of the suggestion by alsiladka, a new tab has been added to WinPatrol which combines all entries sorted by date first detected on the computer.

I have already tested the new WinPatrol Beta and, not having installed any new programs recently, I found all these strange etilqs. files on the new Recent tab:



Being a WinPatrol PLUS subscriber (See Security Garden and BillP Studios "WinPatrol Discount!"), I double-clicked one of the files to learn more about them.



With that information, I knew it was safe to select the files and click Delete as shown in the first image above.

The following is the warning message provided when you ask WinPatrol to delete a file from the Recent list:



For stubborn files, select the option to delete on Reboot:





References:







Remember - "A day without laughter is a day wasted."
May the wind sing to you and the sun rise in your heart...

1 comment:

Unknown said...

This is great news, Corrine! It's great when MVPs, software developers (in this case also an MVP), and Windows enthusiasts work together on improving an already great product.