WinPatrol 2014 CPU: Can You See Me Now

Towards the end of last year I heard from a number of fans who were concerned about CPU usage by WinPatrol. While many were older systems I have always been committed to providing a great tool for any system able to run Windows XP and beyond. I also consider it unacceptable to impact any performance. It doesn’t hurt that I use WinPatrol on all my computers too. 

Even with reports coming from a small number of people this became a high priority for WinPatrol 2014. Each  report was well documented and most used a popular program, Process Explorer from Microsoft Fellow Mark Russinovich. Sometimes, a program like Process Explorer will trigger our real-time method of detecting changes causing deceptive measurements. I’m still confident even with other programs running users will be happy with the results and many could notice the difference. (A new version of Process Explorer was released yesterday, January 29th) 

Click image to download Process Explorer
Always download from official website

I recently volunteered to help a friends church clean up their computer which they claim has become so slow it can’t be used.  Before using WinPatrol to clean things up I decided it might make a good test machine. After a 5 minute boot up I installed WinPatrol and Process Explorer. The graph above shows the CPU usage of WinPatrol 2014 under some of the worse conditions.

Between the internal workings of Process Explorer and some unwelcome programs I experienced some spikes but nothing that would interfere with normal operation..

I’ll save the topic of upgrading Windows XP for another day but as you can see our test machine wasn’t a high-end machine. It was probably top of the line in 2002.

 

In addition to having one GB of memory I made sure a number of other programs continued to run providing a realistic test. This screen shot of our Active Task list show some of the other programs fighting for memory and CPU usage.

At 420kb, the tiny WinPatrol.exe component sits quietly in the background only waking when Windows indicates some kind of change has occurred. WinPatrol quickly checks the type of change and when indicated uses a layered approach to decide the minimum areas to test for changes. WinPatrol is written with Microsoft C so it’s about the closest any programmer can get to the machine language of the CPU. Using tools provided in Microsoft’s Visual Studio, Windows Sysinternals and by manually reviewing each line of code WinPatrol 2014 is in a unique class.

Yes, I really do pay attention. You may get tired of hearing it but the future of WinPatrol really depends on your support and sharing your experience with others. As long as newsletters, and technical experts continue to share WinPatrol recommendations I’ll be able to share new features with our Free & lifetime PLUS members.