WinPatrol Alert - A New or Changed Program

When a change is detected on your system WinPatrol will alert you and give you the option of Accepting the change or Rejecting the change. The most common change is a program being set to always run when you reboot or start your computer. WinPatrol's goal is to assist your understanding of why this change occured and help you decide if it may be something you wanted or expected to change.

One way is to offer a "PLUS Info" button which will connect you to our online database of program information. While this feature is enhanced for our PLUS members WinPatrol will still help you search for an answer. We also provide statistic based on decisions of others in the WinPatrol community. This is all meant to help you decide if you want to Accept or Reject a new program.

Frequently, when a change occurs it will be followed by many other changes. To prevent overwhelming notifications WinPatrol will use your initial decision and its experience to Accept or Reject other immediate changes. If you're a power user, you can request to be notified for every possible change. This setting can be found under our Options tab, "Hide Alert Messages" on our main tabbed interface.

You'll also notice some useful links on the right side that will provide additional tools which help you identify a new program.

The Help link will open up this page.

Open Folder will open Windows Explorer to the exact location where the new file has been installed. This can give you a better idea of where this file came from. If it's a dangerous file you can also use Windows File Explorer to delete or rename it.

The Properties link will open the Windows Properties dialog so you'll know everything available within Windows to identify a file and what it may be used for.

On the Startup Program Alert you'll see the Disable link. This will still be an option on our main interface if you do Accept a new file. This option can be useful if you continue to see the same file even after you tell WinPatrol to Reject it. Some programs just don't get the message and will detect if they've been removed as a Startup program. If you set a file as Disabled, WinPatrol will automatically remove it from the Startup list without bugging you with an Alert message.

Finally, there is Exit WinPatrol. This is included when you've been attacked and you don't have the time or patience to read each screen provided by WinPatrol. This is really meant for users who had WinPatrol installed on their computer and don't understand why they're receiving alert messages. When you Exit WinPatrol the monitoring will end but you still may have changes you'll need to address. When you run WinPatrol the next time you'll still receive alerts for any changes that you haven't Accepted.

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