15-Minute Reviews :: SysTracer v1.4

Hello all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review. Today’s application is on SysTracer version 1.4 by Blue Project Software – An application to take snapshots of your system and see what may have been changed between times.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“SysTracer is a system utility tool that can analyze your computer finding your modified files, folders and registry entries. Also SysTracer shows information about services, drivers and applications that are configured to run at computer startup. Each scan of SysTracer generates an overview image of your system stored into a snapshot.

Recording the snapshot usually takes a few minutes depending on your system complexity. If you want you can choose to scan only files, registry or applications, in order to speed up the recording process.

By comparing snapshots from before and after a new program installation or execution, you can determine which files or registry entries were added, changed, or deleted.

You can create as many snapshots you may want, and you can compare anytime any pair of them, having the possibility to export differences to HTML list.”

Quick Pros

• Interface extremely easy to use
• Creating a snapshot is surprisingly quick
• Drivers does work – In ‘Only differences’ mode
• Color-coded layout for quick visibility
• Compare displays a lot of information

Quick Cons

• Applications tab name a bit misleading
• No functionality to act on compare information

Expansion

Upon first launch, you will find a very easy interface to use. The application is organized into 5 tabs: Snapshots, Registry, Files, Applications as well as Help & Register. The Snapshots page displays a table-form layout to display all the snapshots you’ve taken, date-time information, size and what was actually taken as a snapshot (Registry, files or applications). Along the side of the snapshot window are buttons for creating and managing your snapshots, and at the bottom of the page resides two drop-down boxes for choosing which two snapshots to compare and the Compare button. The next three tabs – Registry, Files and Applications – shows all the registry, file or application (the last being a tad misleading in tab name) information in a tree/table view. You can choose to view the full scan compartison (or a single snapshot’s information), or to speed the process of reviewing you can turn to ‘Only differences’ for quick review. You can also ‘Export differences’ to an HTML-formatted file for further review or posting to the internet.

While the Registry and Files tab is simple to understand, the Applications tab is a bit confusing until the first time you click on it. It doesn’t directly relate to Applications; Instead it takes a snapshot of the startup applications, system services, as well as drivers. The drivers functionality is supposed to be a Pro-version function only (As seen by clicking on ‘Drivers’ when in View mode of ‘Full’ – States ‘Available only in pro version’), however, if you change to ‘Only differences’ View mode, you can actually see the differences – Likely a bug, as since this functionality isn’t supposed to exist in the standard version ( See the Features Comparison ) but a beneficial bug in this case.

Once you’ve created two snapshots, the compare process is fairly intuitive. Although the ‘Find’ function appears to be disabled, with ‘Only differences’ on, it is very easy to wade through the changes, so long as you haven’t built up too many changes between the two snapshots. Changes are all color-coded: Red lettering indicates an item which has been deleted between the first and second snapshot; Green means an item was added; Blue means that an item has been modified or an item below the current item has been modified; Black means no changes (Won’t appear while in the ‘Only difference’ view mode). All the entries provide a reasonable amount of information on each.

This is a great concept for an application for those who may be trying to track an issue down, or trying to see what excess registry entries an application may leave, or many other uses. With that said, this application is really only a ‘view’ tool; There is no functionality to be able to act on the changes. There could be functionality such as allowing for building your own uninstall application (For those applications which don’t like to uninstall their own registry keys or like to leave leftover files), or ways to purge all new files between two snapshots for quick reversion. There is a lot that could come from this application.

Final Verdict

Overall this application’s concept is intriguing. The ability to see what has changed on your system over a timeframe in fairly detailed form (Without actually making a full-drive snapshot/backup) is quite powerful in itself, so long as you have a need for it. It could stand to actually expand from its current functionality to actually include actions on the changes it finds. For free, if you have a need for this style of application, this is definitely worth it. As for paying $29.95, it depends on what you would use it for that would really dictate if it is worth it; It does what it is intended to, and if you could find a use for it to offset the $29.95 cost, it may be worth it.

Posted by BladedThoth on Friday, November 02, 2007