Monitoring system changes should therefor concentrate on the core parts of the Windows operating system, say the Windows Registry and the system32 folder in the Windows directory. You find several applications that can monitor selected folders in real time, Winpatrol is one of them.

Tiny Watcher monitors system changes in a different way. It scans the important folders and Registry locations during initial setup and reports on the changes only when it is started again. This has the advantage that no application is monitoring the system in real time which consumes system resources. The disadvantage is that the user will be notified about changes after they happened.

Tiny Watcher is therefor not a real time system protection application, more of a tool that allows a forensic analysis of system changes. It still offers functions to deal with the changes that have been made to the system.

It provides access to a web search to gather information about a change but also to confirm, disable or remove it. Those actions can be problematic, it is generally not advised to delete items unless it is known that deleting them causes no harm. It is normally not a problem to delete a startup entry but it could be highly problematic to delete a file in a Windows folder.

Tiny Watcher works best when executed during system start or closely after. Each action is written in a log file which is – again – excellent for tracing a file or system change.

Tiny Watcher is hosted at Donation Coders. It runs on pretty much every Windows operating system, yes even Windows 95, including Windows XP and Windows Vista. It surely does not look pretty but I’d say functionality > looks all the time.

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WinPatrol offers a new layer of defense against malware that was not detected by your security softwares. It monitors the different Startup possibilities, File Associations, IE Helpers, Scheduled Tasks and Services asking the user every time a program wants to add an entry to those places.

WinPatrol also displays all entries that already exist in those places giving you the opportunity to remove any entries that you want. The best thing to do would probably be to take a look at all menus that WinPatrol offers to make sure that only applications and services are started that you trust. You can remove everything else and let WinPatrol do the rest to make sure that they or other elements are not added again.

The freeware has a size of roughly 700 K and has to run in the background to be able to work correctly.

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