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.

If you want to find out how many hours you spend on your computer in the last three weeks you might want to download and run the portable time tracking software PC On / Off Time. The application can be run from any location and displays the logged in time of a user on the system. While logged in time does not necessarily mean that the user was working it can lead to a solid understanding of a user’s work schedule, especially if the computer in question is located in an office building. It can be used for monitoring usage albeit on a basic level.

Once started the time tracking software displays the usage of the first username of the system. A pulldown menu at the top makes it possible to easily switch to another user that is known on the system.

The tracking hours application presents the hours of a day on the x-axis and the date on the y-axis. The help button in the interface explains how the program is tracking the hours. It is doing so by analyzing the Windows protocol. The application is compatible with all Windows NT based operating systems including Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2003.

In case you are wondering about my schedule: I changed the timezone of my computer on August 23. Can anyone beat my score? I know some of you guys have your computer turned on 24/7 which would make such a time tracking software rather useless.