Windows Tools, Help & Guides

In this post, I am going to show you how to find who is using your computer and for how much time. I can find at least three reasons why this can be very useful:

• You want to control the usage of your computer; maybe your children spend too much time in front of it—even when you are not home.
• You are running a server, with this I mean a computer that cannot be shutdown, and you want to know if it’s up and running.
• You want to control your own usage—sometimes is very useful to have statistic about this.

Some might say that using Parental Controls is easy to block the access to a computer at some hours, but we are not trying to block anything.

If you have read in some of my previous posts you have noticed that for many tasks you have the programs installed by default with your Operating Systems. This post is written for Windows 7 and I am going to use Task Scheduler to achieve the goal.

Launch Task Scheduler

Press WinKey, and search for Task Scheduler.

Click Task Scheduler.

Create The Tak

Click Task Scheduler Library.

On the right pane select Create Task and select the General tab.

If you are using it on a server check Run whether user is logged or not.

On Triggers tab, click New:

Select On a schedule:

Selecting daily, and repeating the task every 5 minutes for 1 day makes the application run forever (which is what we want.)

Now we have to specify the action we want to start:

The program is a command prompt, we can launch the program using cmd. As arguments we type:

/c echo %username%,%time%,%date% >> UpTime.csv

In start in we select the path what we want that the task store the information in our case:

c:\windows\

Now we only have to open to see the information:

And see the result:

The name of our user is User (sorry for the simplicity.) Even though the task is very useful, it has one drawback, have you noticed it? More importantly, do you know how to improve that?

About Angel Luis

I am an Engineer of Telecommunications that love computers. My first computer was a Commodore 16kb, about 25 years ago and since then I am always fighting computers problems. Please visit my entries and ask me about whatever problem you have, I will be pleased to help you. My email is discoveryourpc [at] gmail [dot] com. You can follow me on twitter @agenlu or read my blog www.discoveryourpc.net

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