Wintasks 5 Pro review

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One of the big problems with the most malicious spyware is that the startup entries are hidden in obscure places and cannot be stopped by the use of standard windows applications like msconfig or even a regedit in the traditional places for startup items. This program solves this problem by simply preventing a process on the block list from running. Often this is the first and hardest step to getting certain spyware out, especially those too new to be picked up by the traditional spyware scanners like Spybot and Ad-aware. Certainly you could do something similar with HijackThis, but the WinTasks method is far simpler. Wintasks does not stop at block lists, but also has an allow list. If one sets this up, only those processes on an allow list would be able to run. This could be useful for families with members who are not so technically literate to avoid installing spyware. One could just allow the essential system processes and any program that they actually wanted to run to work, preventing malicious programs from running.

Copyright Guru3D.com 2004One thing that would have made this feature much more powerful would be a password protect function. With this, one could imagine using this as a type of PC lockdown software at a better price (Wintasks is currently $49.99, while Fortres 101 is $59.99).

A system administrator or a parent could only allow essential programs to be run and prevent installation of any unauthorized software. In fact, for some applications, it could be better than solutions like Fores as it still allows users to feel like they are in control of their machines, something that would be useful for a law firm where an important partner keeps installing Gator (This example is based on a real life event). It also has an interesting set of features that seem aimed at the software developer set. Wintasks can do two things that could be useful to the developer, both of which might be of interest to the standard user as well. The first is that the program allows the user to see exactly which dlls and drivers a program is using, and giving descriptions of many of them, allowing one to track down conflicts much more easily. Also cool is the system resources graphs.

Copyright Guru3D.com 2004

These are far more useful and powerful than those the Task Manager provides. It will record each process for up to 24 hours, so you can monitor long term stability of a program or figure out which program just caused your machine to freeze up for a second. Potentially, the coolest and most powerful feature of Wintasks is the scripting. It essentially allows the user to write scripts to fine tune every process depending on a variety of events. You could write a script to increase the priority of an application using more than 50% of the cpu or stop it when it uses 80%. After reading about this feature, i was pretty excited, on a computer like mine, running a software firewall, av software, and a host of programs I cannot really get rid of the potential to be able to raise the priority of a game over normal and lower the priority or even close other running processes was inviting and the language was certainly simple.

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