Monitoring tool fails

Activ for Vista is a free program that claims to monitor your system's processes, DLLs, and Registry. Thanks to an unintuitive user interface and lack of user guidance, we never got very far with this program.

The user interface is too plain and too vague. There are three check boxes on the left side of the small window for settings: Process Start/Stop, DLL (Image) Load, and Registry. On the right side of the window are the file creation options. Not knowing where to go next, we checked off our monitor settings and clicked the Apply button. Nothing happened. We then checked off the option to create a new file, but again, nothing happened. There is a Help button at the bottom of the interface, but it wasn't working during our tests. A link to the publisher's Web site is listed on the interface but, par for the course with this program, it doesn't work. And even after a visit to the publisher's site, we didn't find the guidance we needed, only links to e-mail technical support.

If you're looking for a free program to monitor your system's processes, we suggest you keep looking for a program that is more intuitive and effective.