Have you ever wanted to ensure your children aren’t giving out personal information online? Even if you’ve had a lengthy discussion with them about staying safe online, a child may not realize just how much information they’re giving out. Or are you an employer who wants to monitor the work habits of your employees? These are possibly two of the most common uses for a keystroke recorder.

This week, we’re giving away 10 copies of Widestep Security’s Elite Keylogger 4.6 PRO worth $990 (Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7 32-bit compatible). Let’s take a look at what this fantastic app can do for you.

Before we begin, MakeUseOf would like to state that we do not condone the use of key-loggers for malicious purposes. This giveaway is to support its use in the business environment i.e. monitoring employees or supervising your child’s internet activity and the like.

Elite Keylogger 4.6 PRO comes with all the features you could need for monitoring a user’s actions on your computer and it does it with a simple interface. You can set it to record every keystroke typed, what programs were used, which web sites are visited and even take screenshots at a set interval.

Elite Keylogger hides from the user’s view completely. It doesn’t show in the taskbar, control panel, or processes. In my tests, it even bypassed virus scanners. If I didn’t install it myself, I wouldn’t know it was on my system. After installation, you are given instructions on how to unhide the program for configuration.

After following these instructions, the program loads for you to set the options.

On the right menu you can select the date for the logs you want to see. After that, you select which type of log (keystrokes, screenshots, etc.) to view. The keylogger can email the logs to you privately. The program logs all keystrokes, including passwords, so be aware of this when sending any information over email.

You’re able to select specific items to track and set it for specific users. Even when recording keystrokes and taking screen-shots every 20 seconds, I didn’t notice any drop in speed or extra RAM usage on my 3 year old laptop, so the software does a nice job of running efficiently.

As shown above, the software also keeps track of what applications are used and even the specific times they are launched and closed.

Screenshot tracking alone can tell you a lot about a person’s computer use. If you take frequent screenshots, I recommend lowering the snapshot quality to 8-bit to preserve disk space. All screenshots are shown in an easy-to-view thumbnail gallery and can be enlarged with a click.

If you’re looking for an undetectable, low resource, and easy to use keystroke tracker, I highly recommend Elite Keylogger 4.6 PRO. Download the fully-functional 7-day trial and check it out for yourself.

If you don’t mind your users knowing that they’re being watched, try out their free Quick Keylogger.

The free version is visible in the taskbar and easily detected by virus/trojan scanners. You can password-protect the logs, but users can shut down the program if they see it. The free keylogger has fewer options compared to its big brother, but if you’re just looking to record keystrokes then this can do the job.

How do I become a winner?

It’s simple. Just follow the steps.

STEP 2
	Share this post with your friends by clicking on the Share button on the left.

STEP 3
	In the comments section below, fill in your name, email address, paste the link to your Facebook profile in the URL field and tell us why you’d like to win. Make sure to enter your real email address so that we can contact you if you win!

This giveaway begins now and will end on Friday at 2100hrs PST. The winners will be selected at random and announced the following day.

This is a rare opportunity to get a $99 application for FREE so join the giveaway now!

MakeUseOf would like to thank Amy from WideStep for her generosity while participating in this giveaway. Interesting in sponsoring? We’d love to hear from you. Get in touch with us via email.