Download WinPatrol 30.9.2014

BillP Studios has released version 30.9 of WinPatrol. In this program, ‘Scotty, the Windows watchdog’ keeps an eye on the system, making it work faster and more stable. WinPatrol detects and stops spy, ad and malware attacks, 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, file extensions, and whether a program or process is added to the start-up list. 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. The release notes for this release are as follows:

Tooltips
As promised I’ve focused on making WinPatrol easier and more powerful in 2014 with monthly updates. This version now includes Windows tooltips to provide a consistent, helpful interface.

In the past, I’ve avoided tooltips because I knew it would make WinPatrol larger, taking more space in memory. That’s how much effort was put into making WinPatrol as optimized as possible. It also presents an extra challenge for our volunteers who help translate text messages into other languages. I was wrong and now you can choose your favorite tooltip style.

After performing various benchmark tests we found the actual memory used by tool tips would not impact the performance of a Windows based computer. Even machines with as little as 512K of memory were not effected by the new tool tips features. The benefits will really make WinPatrol easier to understand for new users and even folks who have used WinPatrol for years.

If someone doesn’t like Tooltips or wants to use the cartoon like tool tips the Options tab provides a way to set the tooltip style to your personal preference.

Cookie Update for Chrome and Firefox
WinPatrol uses the same public domain code that is used by Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and other new browsers. This version includes a copy of the newest library which appears in the WinPatrol folder as sqlite3.dll. You may notice in the WinPatrol list of hidden files many files that begin with “elitls” followed by random characters. These are SQLite files as you may notice elitls is SQLite backwards.

Window Positioning
We’ve updated some Window components that weren’t completely visible on some machines with custom DPI.