I wanted to suspend a few background processes. Instead I built a mini offline anti-virus.
Monday's plan was calm. Friday got… great.
Shipped
- Full TURBO Service Stop with 3 profiles (Gaming / Work / Economy) and solid crash recovery
- Process Guard — intelligently suspends idle processes (doesn't kill them, just freezes)
- Turbo Power Plan — auto-creates & switches a custom power plan with game detection
- Weekly Performance Report with charts and trends
- new Settings page + 6 fresh hck_GPT intent categories
Scarred
While building Process Guard I added a simple legitimacy check: does chrome.exe actually live where Chrome should live, or is it running from %TEMP%? Then I tested obvious spoofs — svch0st.exe, expl0rer.exe, winlogonn.exe… and the check immediately started flagging them. One innocent safety feature slowly turned into the early foundation of a small offline anti-virus — based on path, behaviour and spoof detection. Completely unplanned.
Also lost hours fighting Polish Windows CP852 encoding hell — one single byte (0x98) broke the entire power-plan system. Classic.
Second week in a row shipping more than planned. Feels weird… but really good. Still doing Żabka shifts. Still building.
This is the project behind the post. PC Workman is a free, open-source Windows system monitor
with an offline AI assistant - everything described here is real, shipped code.
Download it or read the source.