I like the idea of being in total control of every important modification the Windows registry have. And for that reason I’ve been using TeaTimer, a program that comes with Spybot S&D that warns you every time the registry is going to be modified letting you choose to allow or deny the modification. I really like that, because it prevented me a lot of problems.

The bad thing with this TeaTimer is that almost all the time my task manager shows me that it’s using 80 to 90 percent of my CPU and between 20 and 60 Mb of ram. It slows down every other process running at the same time.

So, I started looking for something that could offer that same kind of protection without clogging the CPU and RAM.

RegProt is what looks like the best alternative to TeaTimer.

I’ve been using it for a month now and it is good. It warns you of every important modification the registry is going to have. Now, about the resources this little program uses: The exe is only 29Kb. It uses 140Kb of RAM while running. Note that I’m talking about Kb, not Mb!! (1Mb=1024Kb, do the math). And the CPU usage never was more than 1%.

Only one little detail to remark. TeaTimer have an option to make the program remember the action taken when a warning comes up, so the next time the same process tries to modify the registry, instead of asking you, it will do what you did the first time. And RegProt don’t have that feature.

Anyway, is a very small price to pay for the big convenience of having the CPU working at 95% and 50 Mb more in RAM.

It comes with a program named rpadmin, which lets you specify if you want to start or stop RegProt and if you want to run it when Windows start.

System requirements: Windows 98 or newer.

Click here to download RegProt.