Windows only I'm sure you've come across a situation where you've wanted to track the changes that have been made to the Windows Registry because it can be nice to know the changes a program is making. That is where an app like Regshot comes in to play.

Windows only If you have a program that you want to ensure is always running the free ReStartMe app may be a necessity for you. All you have to do is give it a list of processes to monitor, and if one of those processes are ever caught not running it will immediately start up the app again.

Windows only Folder Monitor is a free Windows app that can track changes to folders you select. The types of changes include a file being created, changed, renamed, or deleted. When one of those events occur you can have a visual notification appear, a sound played, and a command line action taken.

Sometimes keeping track of website pages can be a pain. Maybe you want to monitor a certain section of a webpage, such as the price of an item on Amazon. Page Monitor for Google Chrome lets you do exactly that, and does so intelligently.

Windows only Once you've had the pleasure of using dual monitors it can be tough trying to go back to a single screen. There are, however, some things that Windows doesn't handle so gracefully.

Mac only A lot of people have heard about the negative impact using Adobe Flash can have on your notebook computer, such as the MacBook Air. Apple even went as far as not including Flash when shipping new MacBook Air computers, and it's likely because of the battery implications it can have.

I'm sure at some point or another we've all noticed our system slowing down due to a "runaway" application using up all your CPU or memory. Then we go scrolling through the task manager to find and kill whatever that application may be, and then continue on our merry way. If you've found yourself in a situation like that then you may want to take a peek at SystemMonitor.

Don't you hate when you're downloading something (namely via BitTorrent) and it renders the rest of your computer nearly unusable. NetBalancer can fix this because it is a Windows program that gives you control over what apps are considered more important than others. You can, for example, designate priority to your web browser instead of your BitTorrent client.

I've found a lot of great apps thanks to commenters on our site, and credit for this one goes to an anonymous visitor on our article about automatically restarting crashed apps. The program I'm talking about is called Kiwi, and it has some unique monitoring capabilities that aren't found in many other applications.

Keeping tabs on my machine is something I've done for as long as I can remember. I like watching the performance of my applications, monitoring network connections, and all of that stuff most people would never think twice about.

Awhile ago I wrote an article that covered various ways you can monitor the remaining battery life of your laptop, but I was starting to wonder what kind of apps developers had come up with for Windows 7 users. Interestingly enough on that same article a commenter, Chris, talked about a nice free app called BatteryBar that did everything I was looking for.

There are some situations where it's nice to monitor the amount of bandwidth that's being used by your computer. One reason would be if your Internet Service Provider (ISP) caps the amount of data that you're allowed to plow through in a given month.