Software Update: WinPatrol 24.3.2012

BillP Studios has released an update for version 2012 of WinPatrol. In this program, ‘Scotty, the Windows watchdog’ keeps an eye on the system, making it work faster and more stable. Scotty detects and stops attacks from spy, ad and malware, viruses and malicious Internet Explorer add-ons, while also preventing home page hijacks. A few other things are also monitored, including the processes running on the PC, the hosts file, and file extensions. In addition to the free version, there is also a paid one Plus variant, which provides access to a database with extensive information about programs and processes, which states, for example, whether they are safe or malicious. In this release, ‘several changes have been made to the program to improve stability.

New WinPatrol 24.3.2012

I once wrote about how Windows versions are like snowflakes† These days there are so many versions, so many service packs and so many bad acting applications it’s almost impossible test new software. Add to this all the changes made for 64 bit machines and problems grow exponentially.

The release of WinPatrol 2012 has been fairly smooth but a handful of regular WinPatrol users have reported some bizarre behavior. Some reports made no sense at all. In hopes of continuing a single version of WinPatrol I’ve consulted with some great minds at Microsoft and this version has resulted in many suggested changes.

Since most changes are technical I won’t go into the internal updates that occurred. One change was to remove some of my assembler/machine code which was useless on 64 bit versions of Windows. The Microsoft C compiler has continued to optimize our monitoring code so tests show our real-time monitoring continues to be faster than any other malware monitor on the market.