Winpatrol is an application that is suspiciously similar in it’s claims to most illegitimate offerings (such as Registry Cleaners) I installed it on my virtual Machine.

The first thing worth noting is that the software looks very similar to Autoruns, but it uses what I imagine is intended to be a “friendlier” interface but just ends up being more vague. For example, when I first launched it, It started with the “Startup programs” Tab selected. one of the options, “Display secret startup locations ( Advanced Mode )” caught my attention. “Secret” seems like a vague term. Secret to whom? It was also kind of WinPatrol to stick itself as an auto-start program too.

Delayed Start

Appears to be a feature of WinPatrol whereby it launches a program X time after it launches. Not particularly valuable- if you have enough applications starting up that you need to delay some of them to prevent a long “Time To Desktop” you might have too many startup programs to begin with.

It has some other possibly useful features but As far as I’m concerned the UI is a bit un-desirable. Autoruns can get away with some UI transgressions because it’s designed for advanced users, so the multi-row tabs isn’t as big of a deal. But WinPatrol has the same multi-row tab setup, and at the same time described some features in a relatively vague and hard to follow fashion. eg. “Scotty the Windows watchdog found etc.” No. Win Patrol did. Your customers are not children, and they do not need a fun little mascot to identify with.

The worst part IMO is that many of the features resort on polling behaviour; for example it seems that Registry changing and other change operations are tracked by simply polling every once in a while and seeing what changed. This despite the existence of WMI functionality to track registry changes in an event-based callback structure as well as similar functionality for tracking file changes. So implementing that through a Polling mechanism and then giving it a fancy name doesn’t really scream “competent system management tool” for me.