Winfilter Editor's Review

Winfilter can help you hide desktop icons, files, folders, and even drives on your computer. It can also restrict others from modifying your settings like the wallpaper, screensaver, resolution, and so on. This program does a very similar job to the Group Policy Editor program that's distributed along with Windows XP Professional.

Winfilter's user interface is quite easy to use. The items which you can customize are displayed as a tree. The first level of this tree represents the category of tasks that you can accomplish using Winfilter. There's a separate category for customizing program items (from the Start menu), Start menu, desktop items, quick launch, etc.

The features which seem to be the most useful are the possibility to disable Active Desktop, to remove tabs from the Display dialog (Control Panel), to prevent users from viewing hidden files and folders, and to disable Task Manager. Another rather simple feature caught my eye. It's possible to protect the program with a password.

Pluses: Winfilter supports monitoring the current policy settings. When you press the "Monitor" button, the program becomes invisible, but it continues to monitor the current filter policy. You can re-activate the program anytime by pressing CTRL+F12. Since I'm talking about policies, you should also know that it's possible to load or save the program's filter settings.

Drawbacks / flaws:

In conclusion: Winfilter is a good, user-friendly application for restricting other users' behaviour on your system.

version reviewed: 3.1