gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials » activity monitor

Personal Activity Monitor, Record Applicaton Usage

Martin Brinkmann — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 15:41:12 +0000

How much time are you spending in front of your computer per day? Do you know how much time do you spend surfing the web, answering emails or chatting with friends over Skype? Personal Activity Monitor assists you in finding the answers. The application has been designed as a monitoring tool to improve the productivity of computer users.

If you ever wanted to analyse how you spend your day in front of the computer, then the program is the right choice. So how does it work?

Personal Activity Monitor needs to be installed and started before it begins the monitoring. The application records the time you spend in active programs and ignores programs that are not in the foreground. It uses a counter for every foreground application that increases with every second that it is actively used by the computer user.

The application window displays information about the active program, its path and usage time. All other programs that have been active since the start of the application are displayed with their name and activity time as well.

The activity monitor continues to monitor program activity even if minimized to the Windows Taskbar or System Tray. The application will automatically recognize an idle system after 30 seconds of inactivity to stop the activity monitoring automatically.

How can the program be used to optimize productivity? You need to look at the stats after a workday, or half a day, to see the programs you spend the most time on. The optimization itself depends largely on those applications. Say you noticed that you have spend two hours playing Minesweeper, or watching a video in VLC. Those could easily be reduced or eliminated to improve the productivity. The application cannot help in that last step though, it can only visualize the time wasters.

Personal Activity Monitor can be configured to auto-start with Windows. The autostart option is available in the right-click context menu when it is placed in the system tray.

The app has a few weaknesses in its current stage of development. Web browsers for instance are listed with their name which may not be enough to identify the browser as a time waster or necessary tool. Recording the time spend on individual websites on the other hand could provide the user with a clearer picture.

Another problem is that the program does not keep a record once it has been closed completely. Statistics for the past week or month cannot be displayed or generated which could also help in the analysis. The developer has announced plans to integrate some of the requested features in future versions of the application.

Personal Activity Monitor can be downloaded from the project website over at Codeplex.

PC Activity Monitor

Martin Brinkmann — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 11:28:39 +0000

An activity monitor is a software program that can be used to record PC activity that includes running programs and processes on a computer system. The Windows Activity Monitor installs itself as a system service in the Windows operating system. The service will automatically record PC activity and generate reports that can be accessed with a web browser. Access to these information is available from the same computer system but also remotely which can be very helpful for parents to monitor the PC usage of their children. Other possible uses include running the activity monitor in an office or organization.

The PC activity monitor is configured over the web interface as well. Here it is possible to activate remote access, change the listening port, data retention and password protection. The reports are divided into tabs for easier access. Each report can be configured to show the activity on a specific range of days and by user to filter the results more effectively.

The statistics tab displays the last activity on the monitored computer system as well as the general use of applications in a pie chart. The timesheet tab on the other hand lists when applications where used on the computer system. Groups are helpful to add multiple applications to a single group, e.g. Internet programs or Office programs to get a better overview on first glance.

The last tab will list the running processes starting from the point of running the activity monitor. This usually means that no processes are listed after installation. The process list will however be filled with processes as the service (called wam in the service configuration) is configured to automatically start with Windows.

Windows Activity Monitor can be downloaded from the developer’s website.

Glint a fantastic system monitor

Martin Brinkmann — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 22:37:39 +0000

If you are looking for a highly configurable system monitor you should take a closer look at Glint. The software displays system activity of many – and I really mean many – different values. The default program window alone displays 26 different values like CPU Processor Time, Disk Read and Write Bytes and Memory Bytes available.

Since this looks like an overkill every user can configure the display by removing and adding new activities. The user can choose from five different categories which are Processor, Memory, Objects, System and WMI Objects. Each category holds lots of activities that can be monitored.

Glint is probably not an application for a novice user but someone with a lot of experience can find this really useful. The design of the application might seem confusing at first glance as well, you see 25 blinking colored lights and I would highly suggest to change the layout to graphs and reduce the number of activities that are shown.

Glint does not need to be installed at all which makes it ideal as a quick tool to analyze system activity.

Read More:

Glint