(Credit: Zain bin Awais/PCMag/Microsoft/AppControl)
On my Windows 11 PC, about 400 software processes are running in the background at any given time, and the same is likely true on your computer. They might be doing anything from accessing your location to installing system services to taxing the CPU to viewing your webcam. Monitoring them all is borderline impossible, even if you dig deep into the Windows Task Manager. As such, I decided to try AppControl, a free app for Windows 10 and 11 that promises to track each process’s activity and resource consumption over the last 72 hours. In short, this tool isn’t for the average Windows user, but I can recommend it to power users who want to know exactly what’s going on with their PCs.
A More Powerful Take on the Task Manager
Windows 11’s Task Manager lists processes and their current system resource usage, but that’s basically it. Although Microsoft added an App History tab back in Windows 8, it resets when you close the app, so it’s not helpful.
AppControl works differently. It runs in the background, monitoring system resource usage over time, so you can see the data from five minutes ago or yesterday afternoon. It also tracks important events, including application updates, driver installs, new process launches, and webcam access. The software's creator, Jon Hundley, describes it as “a geeky power user tool focused on people who care about PC hardware performance.”
Can You Trust AppControl With Your PC Data?
Before I install any application, I ask myself: Why would I trust this? Hundley gets it, telling me that he finds it "hard to trust new apps myself sometimes.” But he explains, "I put my name on the AppControl homepage to show there’s a real person behind it. We’re a small indie team with two developers.”
Hundley is also the creator of GlassWire, a popular application that provides deep insights into your PC’s network traffic. “I’ve been making shareware for decades, but I guess nobody uses that terminology much anymore,” Hundley says. Domotz, a network and IT infrastructure management company, acquired Glasswire in 2023, and Hundley says he hasn’t been involved with the app in a few years. Prior to Glasswire, Hundley created ManyCam, a virtual webcam application, which Visicom Media acquired in 2013. He says he has no relationships with data brokers and opposes the collection and sale of user data.
Like GlassWire, AppControl is extremely polished for a free application. It has a detailed privacy policy, which includes instructions for activating a hidden privacy mode that prevents AppControl from ever accessing the network. Hundley also tells me that AppControl will get paid features in the future: “AppControl will follow a typical shareware model: start free, then add optional additional paid features later.” I think that makes the application more trustworthy, since Hundley has a clear plan to create a sustainable business model that doesn’t involve selling user data.
Between Hundley's history as a trustworthy developer, AppControl's privacy policy and polish, and the plan for paid upgrades, I feel comfortable running the software on my PC, and I don't hesitate to recommend it. This is about as trustworthy as Windows freeware from a small team gets.
A Surprisingly Polished Tool for Something That's Free
I installed AppControl on a Windows 11 PC and left it running in the background for over a week. Whenever I launched it, I was impressed by the user interface. It’s sleek and streamlined for an application that exposes information about 400 background processes and their activities. You can hover over the main graph and click to see per-process resource usage at any point over the last 72 hours.
While the Activity tab shows running apps and their resource usage, the Apps list pane shows all processes that have run on your PC since you started monitoring it. You can click any process name to see a description. You can also get immediate alerts of specific events, such as when an app installs a system service in Windows. I know that applications are always running in the background, but it was startling to see just how often they accessed my location and updated themselves. AppControl tracks CPU and GPU temperatures over time, too, and Hundley says he’s working on adding alert options for PC hardware temperatures.
Yes, You Can Kill Processes—But You Probably Shouldn't
Despite its name, AppControl is better for monitoring processes than controlling them. It lets you end processes just like the Task Manager and block specific processes from launching in the future. But it doesn’t let you control access to resources like your location, microphone, and webcam, and it can’t set limits on CPU usage.
When I disabled Firefox with AppControl during testing, my browser windows closed immediately. Windows then showed an error message when I tried clicking the Firefox icon on the taskbar. I had to re-enable Firefox in AppControl to fix this. This control over processes might be useful for troubleshooting problems or immediately disabling suspicious processes, but I’m not sold on this feature. If you don’t want a process running, you should just uninstall its associated app to be safe and ensure it can’t pop up again.
Hundley tells me AppControl should prevent people from disabling Windows system processes, though it warns that you might need to reboot into Safe Mode to fix problems if you still manage to turn off the wrong ones.
AI Makes Sense of the Data for You
AppControl has an optional Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for connecting to AI chatbots, such as Claude. After successfully setting up this integration, I was able to use the Claude desktop app to ask questions about my PC’s performance. For example, Claude informed me that I had over 400 unread events after running AppControl for a week. When I asked Claude to tell me whether any were important, Claude analyzed and summarized the data. You can get this same information just by looking at the data in AppControl’s window, of course, but I appreciate this convenience.
I'm Keeping AppControl, But Most People Won't Need It
I test software professionally, so I’m always thinking about what my PC is doing in the background. I enjoy checking in on hardware usage statistics, and I like getting notifications when applications access my webcam or install system services. Windows 11 makes this data difficult to monitor, but that doesn't mean you should just give up. Thus, I appreciate how easy AppControl makes it to get these details.
However, the average PC user doesn’t need AppControl. If your goal is avoiding malware, you should rely on antivirus software and good security practices rather than trying to understand what each one of your PC’s hundreds of processes is doing. As mentioned, I had over 400 events to review in the AppControl interface after a week of running AppControl. Thankfully, these don’t all appear as desktop pop-ups, so AppControl’s default configuration is not as noisy as it might sound.
I plan to keep AppControl on my PC. It lets me monitor a lot of things I had no easy visibility into before. If that sounds valuable to you, you should definitely install it and give it a try. After all, it’s free. AppControl is the kind of native application I wish Windows had more of.
Just bear in mind that AppControl won’t secure or speed up your PC on its own. Instead, it gives you the information you need to make changes to your system. For example, if an application consistently uses a lot of CPU in the background, you might want to find a more efficient alternative. And if you're not comfortable with a process frequently accessing your microphone or webcam, you should uninstall it.