Crashed or frozen apps are especially problematic in situations where the computer system is left unattended. Examples would be to leave the computer on over night to finish a download, render a movie or compile a computer program.

A crash without safeguard in place usually means that a specific workload could not be completed.

Applications like Restart On Crash, or the previously reviewed Monitor And Restart Crashed Windows Processes, monitor specific programs that are running on the system.

They constantly check if a monitored application is running and responding properly, and react immediately if it is not.

The portable software Restart On Crash monitors applications that are added by the user. The four buttons on top of the interface are used to add and delete monitored applications, display the application log or open the settings of the program.

The add button opens a second program window. Here it is possible to add a running application or an executable from the computer’s hard drive.

Two different crash and hang checks are available. Restart On Crash assumes a program has crashed or hanged if the program does not respond to Windows messages. The second check needs to be activated, it basically assumes that the program has crashed if it is not running.

The after the crash configuration consists of two parameters. The first will kill the application’s process if it is still running, the second executes a command, which usually means restarting the application that has crashed or frozen. Restart On Crash will automatically fill in the application’s path after a process or program has been selected for monitoring.

restart on crash

All monitored applications are displayed in the main program interface. The checkmark in front indicates that they are monitored, removing the checkmark disables the monitoring for the time being.

monitor applications

Monitored applications that are closed by the user, freeze up, or crash are automatically restarted by the software. The kill switch if the process is still running will kill all instances of the program, which needs to be considered. This can be problematic if an application launches multiple program instances that are independent of each other, and only one of them crashes or hangs.

Restart On Crash is a helpful application monitoring tool that offers to restart programs that crash or hang. The download is available at the developer’s website

The software Application Monitor can come in handy for users who run servers of any kind on their computer or who like to download files when they are sleeping or not near the computer. Nothing’s worse than to wake up to realize that the application that controlled the download crashed ten minutes after going to bed.

Application Monitor will monitor applications added by the user in selected intervals. If the software program notices that an application is not running anymore – because of a crash, program termination or other reasons – it will restart it automatically.

All that needs to be done to monitor a new application is to enter a name and point the Application Monitor to the application’s path. It is possible to add arguments that will be executed when the program starts and to change the interval from 2 minutes to a different one.

The system administrator can be notified by email regularly and all events will be logged on the system’s hard drive by default.

Application Monitor is a portable software that requires the Microsoft .net Framework 1.1 to run.

Update: Application Monitor has not been updated in a long time. The program is still listed on the developer website though. A test under Windows 7 confirmed however that it is running fine under the new operating system. The project seems to have been abandoned though.