New WinPatrol Update

I too almost wrote to BillP. It was a few days ago, when I first read about the new update. I was surprised that he described a new feature called "Artificial Intelligence Security" but provided almost no specific information about what it is. All the announcement said was "This new feature will increase WinPatrol's value exponentially over time. It will also be accessible for our future apps like Task Catcher "Extreme" and other partners interested in licensing the technology. Unlike the Optional sharing of choices used on our Community Info pages, all A.I. Security data is kept private on your machine."

Huh? I too held off writing to BillP because I felt he had more important things to do, but I wish he had said something less vague about this feature. I could make all sorts of guesses about what it means or does, but I'd rather have accurate information from him. Oh well. For the moment, I've held off updating.

Bill P has replied to both questions regarding WinPatrol:

1. Scotty barking intermittently for apparently no reason still remains a mystery to him and he gets a report of that on the average once monthly. He says it's been on the bug list for over five years and the best explanation he can come up with is something gets corrupted in memory or in the file. When folks reinstall, the barking seems to return to normal.

2. Re the new feature "Artificial Intelligence Security": Bill understands that his description is more useless than mysterious and he had hoped to announce more by now, but fixing a bug in monitoring Windows updates has kept him busy. As it turns out, he says his timing was perfect because he read a number of messages from non-WinPatrol users that they didn't get the usual Tuesday patch from Microsoft because something had changed their update settings.

Ironically, Bill says he broke the code after someone told him he needed to improve the logic behind the current update warnings. Consistency is important and users shouldn't have to read a question twice before they click on Accept or Reject. He has improved that code and when he makes details public for the third generation of "WinPatrol-power" (his earlier attempted explanations) will make more sense. What he plans is "somewhat radical and having a sizable beta/focus group will be important."

For what it's worth, the latest WP update installed flawlessly as all previous updates. I have greater confidence in WinPatrol and Bill Pytlovany than most other programs and have utmost admiration and respect for his skills.