Applications which need to be running all the time – servers, say – often install themselves as Windows services, and one reason for that is there’s a flexible recovery mechanism which will kick in if the program fails. You can have Windows try to restart the service, launch some other program, even reboot the PC in an effort to get everything working again.

Ordinary programs have nothing similar, of course – but that’s where Restarter comes in. If an application simply must be running all the time, then tell Restarter, and if the program fails or is accidentally closed then it’ll automatically relaunch it for you.

Relaunch programs automatically if they've crashed or are accidentally closed

While Restarter doesn’t provide quite as many options as the services Recovery dialog, it’s still reasonably flexible. You can decide how frequently you’d like it to monitor your target process, for instance. There’s the option to play a warning sound if your app crashes, is closed, or locks up. You can restart the application with your choice of startup parameters, working directory or window style (normal, maximised or minimised), and any of these events can be logged for reference later.

And while setting this up may take a moment, you only have to do it once. You’re then able to create a shortcut which will launch Restarter, and your target application, without requiring any further manual intervention.

Restarter has a few minor problems. It doesn’t always work as you expect: even if you configure it properly, you can’t create a shortcut unless it’s monitoring, for instance. And RAM use is a little higher than we’d like at up to 25MB.

The program is also tiny (under 250KB) and portable, though, and worked well in our initial tests. It’s versatile, too, so if you absolutely must keep some process running, then Restarter probably has the power to help.