Track PC

Track PC Usage for Children or Employees, for Free

When your children are on the Internet, are they visiting inappropriate websites? Are your employees productive, or are they wasting company time? If the answers to these questions are important to you, Activtrak will help you track PC usage for any user, and it's free for up to three PCs.

This guide is purely for educational purposes. You should consult with a lawyer on whether it is legal to track PC usage, for your specific circumstances, and act accordingly.

Create a free ActivTrak account

The first step to track PC usage is to create a free ActivTrak account on http://activtrak.com/.

After we enter our e-mail, we fill in the rest of our information, and create a secure password.

Install ActivTrak on the PC we want to track.

After this, we are ready to download the ActivTrak Agent, which is the program to track PC usage on the remote PC.

We need to either download the .msi file directly on the target PC, or copy it on a USB flash.



On a simple home network, the program can't be installed remotely - this is only possible in a Microsoft Active Directory Network.
The installation is easy, and it won't try to install any third-party apps or adware.



Also, there is zero configuration needed. Since we downloaded the agent through our account, it already contains all the information it needs to start tracking and reporting to our ActivTrak dashboard. It literally couldn't be any easier.
To uninstall ActivTrak, we need to run the agent installer again on the remote PC.

Will the user know we track PC usage?

After the installation, there are almost no signs that ActivTrak is installed and running. We won't find any mention of it in Programs and Features...


...or any start menu shortcuts or taskbar icons.
The only signs that ActivTrak is running are two low-memory processes, svctcom.exe and scthost.exe, which don't really look out-of-place among the others.



There is also the startup service, named svctcom.



Both of the programs executables are installed within the c:\Windows\SysWOW64 folder.



In other words, even for an experienced user, there are no red flags that there is a program to track PC usage.
Unless a user has memorized all the Windows processes, or Googles each one of them, they will probably never find out that they are being tracked.
ActivTrak is also immune to the best malware scanners, such as Hitman Pro...



...or Malwarebytes.

How to track PC usage with ActivTrak

Once the agent is installed, and the target PC has an active internet connection, in a couple of minutes we will get our first statistics on the dashboard, regarding Websites and Applications.


ActivTrak will break down in detail all the websites the user has visited.


We can see how much time they spend on each...


...and even which particular pages they visited, by title.


We can also break down the PC usage to general categories.


Every time the user opens a new page on the browser - creates an "Alarm", according to ActivTrak - the agent snaps a screenshot.


For better tracking, a host of different domains are already characterized as productive and unproductive.


Of course, we can always change which websites are productive and which are not. For example, somebody working as a social media manager is required to spend a large part of their day on social media.
ActivTrak works in a similar way regarding the user's apps.

Will ActivTrak record user passwords?

ActivTrak is an application to track PC usage, not a keylogger. It' wont capture user passwords, or any text beyond the text shown on the screenshots.

Which are the restrictions of the free version

The free version can track PC usage to up to 3 computers, and there can only be a single user with access to the ActivTrak Dashboard.
This makes it a great solution for a family who wants to monitor the children's behaviour online, or for a very small company.
For larger corporations, we need to upgrade to one of the paid plans.

For corporations with more than fifty PCs to track, we can contact ActivTrak for a custom quote.

Is it moral to track PC usage?

As you probably know, what is legal isn't necessarily moral, and this can definitely the case when we track PC usage, especially without a user's knowledge or content.