Daily restarts and starting at boot

Watchdog can restart every supervised app once a day, to clear slow leaks in programs that are not quite solid over weeks of uptime. It is off by default — turn it on with Settings → "Daily restart of running apps". The time defaults to 03:00 local.

Most deployments do not need it. Reach for it when you have a program you know degrades with uptime and cannot fix, not as a routine precaution: a restart is a visible outage to anyone standing in front of the kiosk, and Watchdog is already restarting that program whenever it actually fails.

It can also reboot the whole machine daily — Settings → "Daily reboot of the whole PC", 04:00, off by default. The sequence is: email alert → graceful stop of every supervised app (using each app’s configured signal and grace period, rather than letting session teardown kill them) → shutdown /r. With auto-login and the logon task, the machine restarts and Watchdog relaunches everything unattended. If the reboot command fails, Watchdog restarts the apps and emails an error — the machine is never left with everything stopped. Cancel a pending reboot within its 10-second window using shutdown /a.

If you turn both on, the PC reboot makes the daily app restart largely redundant — leave the app restart off, or stagger the two times so a recycle never starts as the machine is going down.

The same tidy stop is used when the building loses power and the PC has to go off rather than restart — see Shutting down when the power fails.

Windows services cannot show a GUI or launch apps on top of the desktop (Session 0 isolation), so Watchdog runs as a normal elevated process started at logon. On a dedicated or kiosk machine, this provides effective start-at-boot:

The task runs only while logged on, with highest privileges, and restarts on failure. The trade-off is a few unsupervised seconds between power-on and auto-login, and that signing out stops it — acceptable for a single-purpose machine.

The task belongs to the account signed in at the PC. An installer run with nobody signed in, the way a deployment tool such as Intune runs it, gives the task to the account Windows signs in automatically (step 1). With no such account it creates no task: sign in as the account that uses the PC and turn it on in Settings. If Watchdog runs on a configuration file of its own (-c), the task starts it with the same file.