Is anyone familiar with the features of a program called WinPatrol from ‘BillP’? If you are, do you think that the Behaviour Shield in Avast Pro v6 with settings set to ‘ask’ instead of ‘auto-decide’ is enough to replace WinPatrol? I don’t really need many of the other ‘extras’ that WinPatrol offers as I use excellent free tools that do a better job (IMO)…like autoruns for example. WinPatrol monitors areas of the registry, but I have noticed (since altering the behaviour shield setting to ‘ask’) that Avast pops up very useful warnings when programs access parts of the registry that could be suspect…quite impressive. Although I don’t know which areas Avast monitors compared to WinPatrol. I think WinPatrol monitors all areas in the registry that stuff can be run from and also stuff long hosts.
Hello Yokenny. I don’t understand why you posted that link, sorry.
I too am familiar with the features of WP, as I’ve been using it for years, but that wasn’t what I was asking. I was asking whether Avast’s behaviour shield set to ‘ask’ was basically doing a similar job to WinPatrol, thereby making WP somewhat redundant as the other tools in WP are neither here nor there.
I have avast!'s Behavior Shield set to ‘Ask’ and it pops up very seldom however if I install a new application that modifies what WinPatrol monitors then the ‘Scotty’ dog barks at me.
So Detect and Review New Auto-Startup Programs is detecting new applications that want to autostart and Behavior Shield will not do that.
Behavior Shield is only aimed at monitoring “suspicious behavior”… by whatever (heuristic??) means avast defines “suspicious”. In contrast, WinPatrol monitors a plethora of items. I am a long time very-satisfied user of WinPatrol. Personally, it’s one of the first programs I install on any computer I use, and I would not want to be without Scotty. If you’ve used it, and are unsatisfied (for whatever reason), that’s of course your prerogative.
The question has nothing to do with dissatisfaction, it’s all to do with duplication. Why run two programs when one does the job of both? IOW. However, if Avast isn’t monitoring those same areas of the registry then of course WinPatrol stays installed, as always.
Well you only have to check out some of the signatures in these forums and you will see a lot of people using WinPatrol as it covers areas not directly catered for by the behaviour shield.
Many of those will also be the Plus version as it goes that little bit further.
Well I thought (and still think) it was a fair question, DavidR. If the idea of ditching WP has narked anyone…well…what can I say? There ya go :-X
To be frank, it could be a mighty long (and slightly weird) process scouring posts looking for individual sigs with ‘WinPatrol’ in them or ‘WinPatrol Plus’ simply to determine who uses what software. And besides, just because someone uses WinPatrol and chooses to display this in their signature doesn’t necessarily provide me with the information I’m after…it just shows that they use the program and obviously like it. Lots of people duplicate function because they support a particular software they’ve liked and have used for years. I often read posts where a poster claims to use say 5 AV scanners together with 4 malware/spyware scanners and a royal host of other stuff and they are quite proud of their ‘fortress’ of tools to combat being ‘got at’. Not that running another AV is a sin, because I have ClamWin installed as well…but then that doesn’t really duplicate function, just provides a second opinion.
Even though I’m on the extra cautious side of careful, I nonetheless review what I use and try not to bog my system down with unnecessary offerings, regardless of how wonderful the software is, or how long I’ve used it for. Just because something offers to make me ‘feel safer’ doesn’t mean it actually does make me safer, and I consider this with any security software. But, if WP is still necessary - to back up Avast - then I’m still glad of it, and happy to continue using it…as I’ve been happy to do for years. But if it ever gets to the point where there’s too much ‘duplication’ then I’ll heartlessly trim down regardless of how much kudos the author may have, or how much I have invested in supporting it previously.