M Patrol is a great program that has existed for years. I started running it on my computer a few months ago and finally decided to register it recently. PM Patrol is powerful yet sleek and fast.
| the Rave: PM Patrol v4.1b | - by Noah Sumner |
M Patrol is a great program that has existed for years. I started running it on my computer a few months ago and finally decided to register it recently. PM Patrol is powerful yet sleek and fast.
Basically PM Patrol helps you monitor your system resources. It tells you how heavily you are using your CPU, the state of your swapper file, and even how much "Internet time" you have used. But this is only a scratch on the surface of the power of PM Patrol. You can also monitor the amount of free space on your disk drives, the amount of power you have left (for notebooks) and how long you have been using your computer. There are many graphs for those of you that are graphical and a nice small bar of text that sits on the bottom of your screen for those (like me) that prefer text. And for those of you that are fast asleep running ten copies of WebExplorer at once it will even yell at you that you have almost no swapper file space left! All of this is very configurable and easy to understand too.
PM Patrol also includes many useful "bonus utilities". These include applications like Fast Help, Fast Find, Fast Format, and many other little programs. All of these utilities are actually useful too! "Fast Help" finds help for OS/2, DOS and Windows 3.1 programs. I detest the "find objects" utility included with OS/2 and used to use "seek and scan files", however "Fast Find" will search for many more specific items including running items! I also can't stand waiting for a disk to format. With "Fast Format" it takes less then 10 seconds per disk. Need I say more? And these are only a few of the utilities included with PM Patrol.
All these features also help you configure your computer and decide what programs to use. You can see what DLLs are being loaded, and what programs are using the most resources. For example, for a short period of time I was using Live Wire but I discovered that it was a hog and switched applications. As well, you might be running out of hard drive space and need to have a swap file that is perfectly sized in order to not waste any space. You can easily determine the perfect size with PM Patrol!
You can also use PM Patrol to change settings you might not know how to do on your own. You can easily change your mouse pointer from within PM Patrol (some sample pointers are included). Also, you can access folders from a small pop-up window in PM Patrol so if your desktop is too cluttered you can put many things in a sub-folder and still easily be able to access them!
The price of PM Patrol is also unbeatable. Many small applications exist which can do part of its job but these programs would quickly clutter up your desktop and you would probably have to spend a lot more than $100 to get all the power of PM Patrol. PM Patrol doesn't clutter up your desktop and is only US$29. PM Patrol v3.0 was considered a steal at approximately $100, but version 4.0 is shareware, more powerful, and only $29. As well, bulk pack discounts are available.
PM Patrol is a great product for those of us that want to get the most power out of our computers. At the time of this writing v4.0c was out but by the time you read this, v4.1b will be available and promises to be even better. I strongly suggest that you look for yourself to see its true power, so head off to the site below!
PMPatrol v4.1bOur Sponsors: [BMT Micro] [ChipChat] [EmTec] [Indelible Blue] [Mt. Baker]
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