Process Patrol

We live in an age where almost everything we do has something to do with the Internet, either we are constantly downloading or uploading something, and all that data exchange can make your system an excellent target for malware and spyware. These programs can slow your computer down to a crawl, and bombard you with pop-up ads whenever you try accessing the Internet through your browsers. Process Patrol is a combination between a process monitor and a malware remover tool, as it manages to list all of the processes currently running on your PC, including hidden ones that may hinder your system's performance.

Unlike anti-virus programs, this program cannot stop you from installing potentially dangerous software, nor can it be used to delete whatever is already in your system, but it can stop anything actively running. From the settings menu, you can set the program to scan your process list at a given time interval so that everything can be monitored even in real time.

Programs you actively know are affecting your system can be manually added to a blacklist, thus ensuring they will never start up again, while the ones that you add to the whitelist will never be displayed in the scan lists ever again. This means the more you use the program; the cleaner your system will get until you properly remove the source. Despite the real-time monitoring features, the program is surprisingly light as far as system resources go, being almost as light as the OS' built-in Task Manager.

Process Patrol may seem dated by today's standards, especially from a visual point of view, but it still manages to get the job done extremely well. While newer versions of the Windows OS may already have similar built-in programs, this is especially recommended for those with older systems, and therefore, older OS.