If you suspect this is occurring, you can monitor your computer to see how it is being used when you’re away. Let’s look at some tools that will do just that.

Revealer Keylogger & AllInOne Keylogger

The easiest way to tell what someone is doing on your computer is to use a keylogger. As you likely already know, this is a piece of software that logs keystrokes, which can then be retrieved later. You will be able to obtain information about what keystrokes we activated, thus providing an activity history.

If you’d like to stick with free solutions, Revealer Keylogger is a good choice. This utility logs keystrokes accurately and also records the process in which the keystrokes were logged as well as the time. The software can also be hidden from the user. It’s basic, but it works. Note that anti-malware software may quarantine this tool upon download, so you’ll need to remove the quarantine before you can install it.

Want more features and options? Then you’re going to have to go paid. One of the better options is AllInOne Keylogger, which captures keystrokes like any other, but has advanced log filtering options and the ability to send logs to specified email addresses, FTP servers or networked computers automatically. In addition, this software can take screenshots and record sounds via microphone. You can use this option free for seven days, but it’s $69.95 afterwards.

SurveliStar Activity Monitor

Keylogging can pick up a lot of information, but sorting through it to make sense of web activity can be a pain. SurveliStar Activity Monitor provides a easier and more comprehensive way to track web activity.

Once activated, SurveliStar can pick up on a number of online activities including web browsing, file transfers, and emails. These are then logged for later review. The log are very detailed particularly where web browsing is concerned. Everything is picked up including web use through extensions, plugins, etc.

Surprisingly, this software is free. You only need to pay for enterprise use of the software, which starts at $69.95.

iSpy – Automatic Webcam Recording

Let’s say that unauthorized computer use is just the beginning of your problems. What if you’re also concerned about what’s going on around your computer? A keylogger or activity monitor can’t help you there.

That’s where iSpy comes in. This free, open source software has the ability to automatically record video with your webcam while you’re away. It has motion tracking and scheduling features that allow you to record only when you need to, and it also has the ability to automatically upload recorded video to the web, including YouTube. That’s handy because it allows for remote storage of video immediately, keeping it safe from any attempt to delete it.

Heck, you can even access your webcam remotely via the Internet while it’s recording and catch your roommate eating ice cream in your bed red-handed.

Conclusion

The tools above provide a complete pack for monitoring your PC. You can find out what was typed, what websites were visited, what files were downloaded, and what emails were sent. You can even see what’s going on in front of your computer remotely via your webcam.

Still, there may be an element here that I’ve missed, or software that readers prefer. If you have some advice on how to monitor activity on your PC, be sure to post in the comments.

The ability to monitor everything that’s happening inside is especially useful for those with slower machines. They need all the juice they can get. Running applications – even if they are in the background waiting – eat up system resources.

Hours are wasted everyday just waiting for the computer to repeatedly get back to its senses. It would be very nice if you could know all the running processes on a Mac, pause the ones that you currently don’t need, and force some of them to quit if you need to.

An Ounce Of Prevention Is Better Than A Pound Of Cure

Sometimes people think they know what’s best for us. That’s why there are applications that take the liberty to add themselves to the startup list even though the users do not ask them to. What’s even worse, some do this quietly without letting the users know.

So it’s no surprise if there are suddenly tons of applications appearing at start up.

The first step in taking control of the running processes on a Mac is to filter these self-added applications. You can do this in Mac by going to the Accounts Preference pane. Open System Preferences > Accounts > Login Items and you can delete the ones that you don’t need by selecting them and press the minus (-) button.

Monitor The Madness

Mac OS X also provide its users with tools to monitor all the running applications called Activity Monitor (Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor).

Upon opening, you’ll see everything, along with other necessary information like the amount of memory used, percentage of utilized CPU power, number of threads, etc.

This is the window display when I consciously open only one application – Firefox.

Quickly Quit Or Pause

Quitting an application is simply pressing “Command + Q” or going to the “Quit” menu. But as a last resort – when your system has become unresponsive with all the open applications, you could force some applications to quit using Activity Monitor. Just select them from the list and press the “Quit Process” button.

You could also terminate major applications via Force Quit Applications window. Press “Command + Option + Escape” to summon the window.

But forcing the application to quit is not always the only answer. You can also try to pause the inactive applications and give the computational power to the applications that you are currently use. Later on, when you want to use those halted apps, you can easily activate them again.

This method is perfect for applications that take up a large amount of system resources, but you need them all the time and the process of quitting and relaunching them will take too long. Something like Firefox with lots of open tabs.

I couldn’t find any native Mac OS X way to pause/unpause applications. But I found an application called Pauser that can do it. It’s an old application, but it works just fine under Snow Leopard.

Pauser will reside in the menu bar. To pause any application, click on the icon and choose the application from the list. Clicking the item again from Pauser list will unpause it. The paused application will be in the not-responding state and take zero amount of CPU processing power. Unfortunately, pausing an application will not free the memory used by it.

Here are the comparisons beween active and paused Firefox.

Here are a couple of articles related to Activity Monitor you might want to check out: Macnifying OS X: Learning To Utilize Activity Monitor on Mac and atMonitor ““ A System Monitor On Steroids [Mac].

If you know another alternative to Pauser, please share using the comments below.

Image Credit: andresrueda

Today, I’ll be featuring a tool that takes the functions of Activity Monitor and pushes them into overdrive. The tool in question is called atMonitor and it’s like Activity Monitor on a ton of steroids. The interface is almost the same. One of the many noticeable differences, though, is the addition of an information panel in the Top Window.

If you find that a particular runaway process, let’s say for example, ATSServer, is constantly using up 100% CPU power in Activity Monitor; the standard response is to perform a Google search and determine whether or not it’s safe to quit the process. Not required in atMonitor. That’s where the information panel comes in. It will display all the necessary information about every process or application that’s selected and allows you to make a judgement on the spot.

If an application is selected, it will query osx.iusethis.com for its description and latest version. It will then compare the latest version against the version installed on your Mac and tell you if an update is available. Besides that, there’s a Version column which displays the current version of every app/process running and an icon next to it that symbolizes if it’s up to date.

If there’s an app which is outdated, just click on its icon in the information panel and you’ll be taken directly to the app’s web page. How cool is that?

Another awesome feature is Reveal. Let’s say you find a fishy rogue process running in atMonitor, you can use the Information Panel to read more about it. Subsequently, let’s assume that you decide that it shouldn’t be running because it belongs to an app which you’ve deleted; you can easily kill the process, then use the Reveal button to display the particular file in Finder – then Trash it!

Another cool function is Renice Process. atMonitor allows you to alter the processing priority of particular apps. You can increase or decrease the priority, providing more CPU power to more important apps. This function will definitely come in handy while performing CPU-intensive tasks like applying layers in Photoshop or encoding video.

atMonitor comes in three different forms of view: in the menu bar (essentially replacing a few of the monitoring menu bar apps I know), a floating window and a Dock icon (can only monitor one parameter). These three views provide you with real-time monitoring and reporting so that you have a general idea of what’s going on and can easily scan for the most memory- and CPU-intensive apps. To be absolutely honest, I’m a creature of habit and I already use iStat Menus and couldn’t be bothered to switch. However, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try atMonitor’s menu bar view. Personally, I prefer using Top Window because it resembles Activity Monitor.

Those are just a few of atMonitor’s features, there are several advanced functions I haven’t tapped into yet. Triggers, for example, allows you to set up and run a certain script whenever a particular parameter (CPU, RAM, Temp) reaches a predefined level. Just think of the possibilities!

atMonitor is available for free and runs on Mac OS X 10.5 and higher (Snow Leopard supported). Download it and give it a try. Do you think that it has potential to replace Activity Monitor?

Tracer is a simple one-line Javascript that you can add to your site or blog to monitor the content from your site which users find most engaging. This means, whenever users highlight or copy-paste any text or pictures from your site, Tracer tracks it. What’s more, when users paste the copied content in an email, blog or another web page, Tracer automatically adds an attribution link back to your site, potentially increasing your site’s traffic and improving your search engine rank.

Tracer Dashboard

What does Tracer tell you? The Dashboard gives you a tag cloud of the most copied words, a list of the most copied images and pages, as well as high-level stats for page views, copies, etc. over different time spans. Here is an example of the Tracer Dashboard.

Tracer Benefits

• Automatically tackle plagiarism and protect your intellectual property
• Identify the most appealing keywords on your site, and use this insight to focus strongly on popular content
• Generate more traffic to your site via automatic linkbacks
• Automatic attribution links increase your site’s search engine rank

Sounds too good to be true? Let’s see how easy it is to get started using Tracer on Blogger/Blogspot.

Adding Tracer to Blogger

Sign up at Tynt Tracer with the domain where you want to use it. In our case, the name would be yourblog.blogspot.com. After successful signup, Tracer will give you the Javascript you need to add to your blog.

Copy the entire script code in the highlighted box to your clipboard. Go to your Blogger Dashboard, and click ‘Layout‘. On the ‘Page Elements‘ tab, click ‘Add a Gadget‘.

In the ‘Add a Gadget‘ window, select ‘HTML/Javascript‘.

In the ‘Configure HTML/Javascript‘ window, give it a title like ‘Tracer‘ and paste the Javascript code given by Tracer in the ‘Content‘ section.

You should see a confirmation and the Tracer gadget added to the list of page elements.

You can confirm that Tracer is active on your blog by checking that the gadget is active and visible on your blog.

That’s it! You are all set. Visit your Tracer Dashboard now to get a better understanding of what content your users find really interesting.

Most Tracer users are surprised at the extent to which users are copying their content. Their stats show that 2% of all page views result in some user action it can track. Within the first two weeks of beta testing, it tracked over 250,000 copy-paste operations. It is already being used by ~200 content publishers including bloggers and news media sites with millions of page views per month.

Are you happy with the results on your site? Surprised? Tell us! Also, if you know any other tracking services, share them with us in the comments.

We are seeing new project management applications popping up all over the web today. This, in order for workplaces to monitor what their employees are doing throughout the day and to make sure that they are using their time more efficiently.

Tools like these can not only be used in the workplace, but also can be used at home in the same manner to track your time better and monitor how your kids spend time on the PC. I’m here today to talk about one of the nicer products that does this in a very nice graphical interface. It’s called Manictime.

Manictime is simply defined as ‘Personal time management software to easily log and track work hours’. It sits in the background of your PC and monitors application activity and how much each application is being utilized.

I’m guessing most users will have the application launch at start-up and run throughout their work day. As soon as the Manictime launches into your system tray, it begins logging your PC activity, much more accurately then any application as seen before, such as Wakoopa.

As Manictime sits idle in the background eating up no process and not much memory, it will track each and every program you have open at any given time. How long you’ve had them open, what times you’ve had them open, and also how frequently. Along with that you get in-depth logging, which tells your each and every event.

The end of day displays the real power of Manictime. Here is an example screenshot of the application, after a full day of use.

Along with many different sections in list form, there are also a few different graph options to choose from.

The product not only clocks all of your working hours for the current day, you can also go back and track as many days as you set your preferences to. This can be handy if you’d like reports for the previous work week or month. With some additional knowledge, you could even add the ability to hide the Manictime icon from users and they’ll never even know that they are being monitored.

Manictime is another great time tracking product in a long line of others. It gets the job done with a simple to use interface with easy to read graphs and charts. Download it, and try it out at work or at home. You’ll have some fun with it for sure.

Manictime is great for monitoring usage times for different programs. If you would like to find out what websites you use most and where do you spend time online check out 5 Tools to Track How Much Time you Waste while Online.

Do you have any other great time management products you use to track your time? What do you think of Manictime? Do you think it has any adverse privacy implications if someone secretly places this on someone else’s computer? Let us know what you think in the comments.

So the first option when faced with a frozen or unresponsive application is to kill it. Not literally, of course! We can try to kill or “terminate” the program. The easiest way to do this is to simply right-click the application in the Dock and select ‘Force Quit’.

Another method is to bring up the “Force Quit Application” menu by pressing ‘Cmd-Option-Esc’ and selecting the application which is non-responsive.

Usually, by forcing an application to quit, we lose any unsaved work. Waiting for the program to resolve itself is a better alternative if you can afford the time. Personally, I’m not quite patient enough. So, it’s a compromise between overworking your CPU and data loss.

Then there is the third method: using Activity Monitor.

One of the first things I do every time I get my hands on a brand new Mac is to add Activity Monitor to the Dock. Simply because I use it so often, accessibility is crucial. If you didn’t know, Activity Monitor is located in ‘~/Applications/Utilities’. Or you could Spotlight for it.

Activity Monitor is the evil twin brother of Window’s Task Manager. With it, you can see a platter of vital information including all running processes, memory usage, CPU load, hard disk usage & read/write speeds and network activity. Mainly, I use Activity Monitor to deal with unresponsive applications. Notice that I said “deal with” and not “kill/terminate” because you can occasionally actually bring a frozen application back to life just by launching Activity Monitor! It doesn’t work all the time but when it does, you’ll be amazingly thankful.

If simply running Activity Monitor won’t solve your problem, you could investigate deeper. Under the ‘Process Name’ column is a list of all the applications which are currently running on your computer. The ones which are unresponsive will be labelled red and will be tagged with a clear (‘application not responding’) title. Unfortunately, I can’t provide you with a screenshot because nothing has crashed yet (crosses fingers). To kill a particular hung application, click on it and press ‘Quit Process’ from the menu at the top.

Sometimes, certain frozen applications are more stubborn and are harder to kill, ‘Force Quit’ won’t do the trick. Whenever that happens, try going into the ‘View’ menu and choose ‘Send Signal to Process’. On the window that pops up, choose ‘Hangup’, ‘Interrupt’ or ‘Kill’. I find from experience that choosing ‘Interrupt’ may just bug the application to become responsive again. Just because an application is hung doesn’t mean that it has crashed, so sometimes you won’t need to kill it to restart it again.

Besides using Activity Monitor to force hung applications to quit, it is also useful to provide you with the vital information you need to know about your Mac. CPU load, for instance, is something simple but useful to know at all times. Increased CPU load can make your fans work harder, that makes more noise and your Mac will also run hotter. Most of the time, if you notice an increased CPU when you aren’t performing any CPU intensive tasks, that’s when something fishy is going on.

Activity Monitor’s dock icon is configurable to show you either CPU usage, CPU history, network & memory usage or disk activity but not all at once. If you want access to all this information, I suggest iSlayer’s range of monitoring applications. Personally, I use iStat menus to show my CPU history, network & memory usage and CPU temperature right on my menu bar, which is wicked!

How often has Activity Monitor brought your frozen application back to life? Let me know in the comments. Also, which monitoring application do you use?