The program is offered as a limited free version and commercial versions. ManicTime Free comes without program support and advanced features like password protection, categorization of applications or advanced search functionality.

The free version of the time tracking software tracks and analyzes application usage automatically, and creates charts and statistics about the general computer usage.

When you start the program for the first time, you will see a tabbed interface that is divided into two main areas. The area at the top of the program window displays the current day and a time bar that visualizes computer, application and document usage on the computer. Different programs and documents are displayed with different color sets. Hovering the mouse over them displays tooltip information about the program, time and duration as well as document titles and related information.

The lower half of the screen displays the active application or document (e.g. browser tab) and totals combined (e.g. how long you spend in the Firefox browser).

The statistics tab displays various information like the top applications and documents, top computer usage or day durations.

You can pause tracking at any time with a right-click on the program’s system tray icon and the selection of “Go off the record”.

The information that ManicTime present can be a real eye opener for some users. Maybe you realize that you spend to much time gaming on Facebook or your favorite Flash games site, or watching movies on the computer.

I personally like the fact that the program keeps not only track of programs but also window titles, so that you can for instance see how much time you spend on specific websites in your web browser.

ManicTime is a handy time tracking software for the Windows operating system. Windows users can download all available versions of the software from the developer website. The program is fully compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Windows operating system.

The free software program Pointstone PC Usage Viewer displays the times the computer has been active. The application requires no background process or initial setup before it can display the PC activity.

This is achieved by pulling the information directly from the Windows Event Log.

pc activty

The Windows Event Log records PC startup and shutdown times, all PC Usage Viewer does is to take the data from the Event Log to calculate the time the computer was turned on.

It is important to note that a turned on computer does not necessarily mean that a user has been actively using it, at least not all the time.

pc usage viewer

The program displays the date, and the uptime on that date as a bar, and as hours and minutes. Blue indicates computer activity, while blank space indicates that the computer was turned off at that time. Weekends are indicated with a light yellow coloring, and crashes with red.

The total hours and daily average are shown at the bottom of the screen. Tabs at the top can be used to switch from grid view to graph or text view. Both do however display the same information.

PC Usage Viewer offers statistics about a PC’s activity. The program is not something that one would run constantly, but it does have its uses. It can for instance be used to check if a computer has been active at a specific time, for instance to see if the kids, friends or coworkers used the computer.

The software is compatible with all Microsoft operating systems from Windows XP to Windows 7. The program is supplied as an installer, it is possible to extract the installer and run the PCUsageViewer.exe from the extracted folder directly.

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.