The Resident TeaTimer is a tool of Spybot-S&D which perpetually monitors the processes called/initiated. It immediately detects known malicious processes wanting to start and terminates them giving you some options how to deal with this process in the future: You can set TeaTimer to:

• be informed when the process tries to start again
• automatically kill the process
• or generally allow the process to run

There is also an option to delete the file associated with this process.

In addition, TeaTimer detects, when something wants to change some critical registry keys. TeaTimer can protect you against such changes again giving you an option: You can either Allow or Deny the change. As TeaTimer is always running in the background, it takes some resources of about 5 MB.

Because threats like toll dialers are time critical - they cost from the first second they have connected. In order to protect you, these have to be terminated at the moment they appear before they can connect at all.

As we used to forget our tea, when we let it brew, we built a small tool with a system tray icon to remind us. We called this tool TeaTimer. When we started to develop the Resident tool for Spybot-S&D, we also needed a system tray icon for this. As we do not like having too many icons in the system tray, we decided to put both tools together and kept the name TeaTimer. The next version of the Resident tool might also have the functions of the original TeaTimer.

You can find the Resident TeaTimer in the tools section.