What Is It?

WatchDOG monitors active processes and performs a restart of that process if it is stopped or alternatively starts a different process.

Why Would You Want It?

Have you ever wished you could automatically restart an application if it crashes or is accidentally closed? Or have you ever needed to start a process when another finishes. WatchDOG is a small application that will do this for you in a simple, convenient and user friendly way.

What Does It Do – The Essentials?

Summary:

• Monitors all active programs/processes
• Starts a defined process when another stops OR
• Restarts the stopped process

Pros: What’s Good?

• Freeware

• Portable (Installer also available)
• Simple to Use

Cons:What’s Not So Good?

• If set to start another program this repeats in an endless loop*
• Can only monitor a single process

*Until this is sorted out it is only useful to start “single instance” utilities. i.e. a process that is only allowed to exist on its own. (There are freeware programs that allow you to force any utility to run as a single instance – see DonationCoder SingleInstance by Mouser)

More About What it Does in Detail:

The developers site FSL gives the following information:

Info:
Little utility for “closed process” monitoring.
Some features:
Reactivate dead or closed process / Execute any application if dead or closed process.
Customizable watch time.
Customizable after execution delay time.
Start with Windows® option.
Start iconized to Tray option.
AutoRun option (turn to active mode when program start).
Automatic (and manual) check for program updates.
Character Set management to support translation into non-latin languages (i.e. Russian, Chinese, etc..).
*NEW* Added support for Windows NT4 (Workstation and Server).

Languages:
English, Italian, Spanish, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Hungarian, German and French.

System Tray Icon

Left or right clicking on the (optional) system tray icon toggles the display of the main screen. There is good use of tooltips throughout the program.

All the currently running processes are displayed and double clicking on any process sets it as the watched process.

The process to be run is set by browsing to it through the standard windows file selection dialog (It’s a shame that where you want this to be the watched process it is not automatically filled in)

Clicking on the Setup button shows the following screen which is also displayed the first time WatchDOG is run.

Setup Screen Options

The options are fairly obvious from the screenshot, again there is good use of tooltips. The Test Interval is the frequency of checking whether the monitored process is still running. The Delay interval is the time before the selected process is started when the monitored process has stopped.

There are several language options and the ability to add new translations is available through the FSL website.

Running WatchDOG

When the options and processes have been selected clicking on the “Go” button at the bottom of the main screen starts the monitoring, at which point the options are grayed out. A green flashing button in the Test Interval box shows the program is monitoring.

When WatchDOG detects that the monitored process has stopped the Run Delay box shows a red button and the Report Log records the time.

What are the Technical Details & Compatibility?

What is the My Free Review Experience?

This is a useful little program with potential for improvement. If you need to monitor a program to make sure it is always running or to start another program when one stops/completes then this does the job.

Personally I rate this as:

A useful utility with potential

What Could Make it be Better?

• Monitor several processes each with different options on stop/crash/close
• Ability to start another program only once
• Hotkey to switch monitoring on and off
• Smaller memory requirement & CPU usage (although it is not really bad)

What Other Posts are Relevant?

Why You Want to Use Portable Freeware Applications

Process Tamer – Free Up CPU Resources – Another Winner from DonationCoder

Daphne – Modify, Control & Kill Processes with Your Mouse

What are the Tags?

Popularity: 29% [?]

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 at 7:35 pm and is filed under Portable Freeware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.