Wherever I go, I keep running into system tools. From the outrageous number of program families gathered under the "system tools" banner, today I will choose an application concerning system security.

Safety should be in the first place no matter if it's about your computer, plane, boat or kitchen. When talking about computers, having an antivirus program is good, but not enough. In the remaining gap a lot of programs can be fitted, such as firewalls, spyware hunters and more.

System Safety Monitor was designed to prevent any programs running on your computer perform any malicious action and to block them. The installation kit has 3.2MB in size and the setup process is easy to follow, the only thing worth mentioned about it being that you will be required to restart your computer when it finishes.

Once the computer has been restarted, you will notice a nice green icon that appeared into your system tray and pop up windows that start appearing and ask you about what should be done with your running applications that try to access your registry or other files. The action that you must do in this cases is choose whether to allow them to run or not, and set permanent rules for programs that you use on a regular basis and know them to be trust worthy.

Now let's check the main window of this program and see what can be done with it. First of all, although it displays "System Safety Monitor - Preferences" in its title bar, this interface takes care of all program's settings and can also help you monitor the activity of the processes running on your computer.

There are five nice tabs aligned under the title bar, the first one being the Process Monitor. Its job is to take care of the running processes and alert you whenever an unknown program starts running. You can view details about the items present here and edit their rules, operation that will take you to the next area of this program, entitled Rules.

The Rules window has four tabs that take care of applications, libraries, drivers and registry. Each of these items allows you to add rules that will control the behavior of your software components. For example, you can calculate checksums for all files and verify them when they are used by the system or set which registry keys are allowed to be changed. Detailed logging features are available for everything that's happening within your operating system.

Next area is called Modules and takes care of vital Windows areas such as INI files or system services. Initialization files and startup items can be protected from being changed, while when system services are installed/uninstalled or changed, you can choose to be warned about this for taking further actions. The Window Filter, last feature available here, is an excellent addition to this program and allows you to view all visible and hidden windows active in your system.

The fourth area, called Options, has eleven items that help you take care of System Safety Monitor's settings. I am very pleased with the excellent Logging settings that can be customized for each application, the highly configurable Highlighting options and the opportunity to use an external virus scanner for checking suspicious items.

The last area is called Information and allows you to view the License Agreement, What's New and About info.

These being said, I'll leave you explore this excellent program by yourselves during the 30 days trial period. Take care or your computer and use this program well!

The Good

System Safety Monitor does what it says, and does it well. It is easy to use, small, doesn't take up much of your system's resources and has a useful Help system.

The Bad

In the beginning, until you get to set all rules for the programs you use, this application's pop ups may become annoying, but other than that, there isn't much to improve, apart from an easier way to interact with the beginners, maybe.

The Truth

System Safety Monitor can be the answer to many people's problems when it comes to their computer's vulnerabilities when facing malware, spyware and different zero-day threats, and if you can't afford the moderate price asked for this program but would like to use it, there's a completely free version with less features at your disposal.

Go ahead, get this program and give your computer better chances for safety!

Here are some snapshots of the application in action: