Program Monitor (ProgMon) Macros

PTFB Pro versions 3.4 and above allow to create "program monitor" or "progmon" items. These periodically check to see if a particular program is currently running on your system. Depending on how you've set them up, they'll either launch the target program if it isn't running, or close/kill the program if it is running.

Why would you need this? Well here are a few uses:

• An office computer has utility that should be kept running throughout the day, and sometimes colleagues accidentally quit the utility
• There's a program you'd like to keep running, but sometimes it crashes out without any warning or error
• There's software on your PC that checks for updates (e.g. for the Java runtime). It's OK for them to run when the computer first starts up, but you don't want them running all day because they just consume memory and other resources for no good reason. Stopping them by hand is a pain!

If you'd like to create a program monitor item, the first step is to click the right-hand side of the Macro button on PTFB's screen and choose "New ProgMon Macro", OR choose Options -> New Macro -> New ProgMon Macro. This launches a wizard to help you create the new item.

New Program Monitor Wizard

To read more about the Wizard, please click the links below:

New Program Monitor - Choose Program

New Program Monitor - Choose Action

New Program Monitor - Launch

New Program Monitor - Close

Other things to be aware of...

1. The default item created by the wizard is set to repeat about once every second. If this isn't what you need, you can edit the new item once the wizard has closed, switch to the Triggers page and set up your own trigger conditions, just as you would for any normal macro or single press item. You could even set the item to trigger on a hotkey - thus tieing the launch (or death) of your target program to a handy key sequence.
2. If you're aiming to keep an unstable program running, you may find that some of the time the program exits without any warning, while at other times you see the familiar Windows error report "XXX has encountered a problem and needs to close" or similar. If the program simply exits without an error, then PTFB Pro will have no problem re-launching it. However in the case where an error dialog appears, the program actually hangs around until that dialog has been dismissed. Consequently, PTFB Pro will think that the program is still running and won't re-launch it until the dialog has been dismissed. The solution is simple: create an additional single press item to dismiss the error dialog whenever it appears.
3. ProgMon Macros are not available on Windows 98 or ME - you must be running NT4 or better to use ProgMon macros.