Whether you think it might be a good idea or not, sometimes there could be a legitimate case for monitoring what is happening on a PC when you are not physically sitting there in front of it. Some people may call it spying but I guess it really just depends on your point of view. While using monitoring techniques to gather private or confidential information from another person is obviously not something anyone should be doing, there are times when someone is perhaps engaging in certain activities on your PC you are not completely happy with.
Perhaps you are just worried about your children visiting places on the internet you’d rather they didn’t, or trying to stop them going to parts of the system causing stability or security issues. As a couple of simple examples; a relative came home from work two or three days in a row to find his kids had infected the machine with a rogue antivirus. Needless to say, they wouldn’t, or simply couldn’t tell him what they were doing or where they were going to get infected. Another person I know has several kids and one of them kept disabling the laptop’s security software and obviously no-one was admitting responsibility. Monitoring the mentioned systems could have given a much clearer indication of what was happening, why it was happening and when.
When mentioning the word ‘Keylogger’, a number of people reading this will raise their eyebrows and think ‘Trojan’ and other malicious software. And they are of course, correct. Malicious keylogger trojans are one of the more common pieces of code that sneak their way onto a computer and log the users actions, such as typing in password or financial details, and sends that information to a remote location. But using keylogging on your own or a friend or relatives PC and having good intentions, with the aim of prevention or education, is more acceptable.
Spyrix Free Keylogger is one such application that is expressly designed to log a number of activities at regular intervals. User tasks such as keystrokes, applications and windows opened and clipboard activity are all monitored. These actions are also automatically captured and stored as a series of screenshots.
The installer is only a 2MB download and installs to under 3MB. After installation the program will popup with its settings window. There nine visual skins available, and to be honest, I’m not fond of any of them but the Windows 8 and Charm skins appear to be the best of the bunch for me at least.
Spyrix Free Keylogger is easy to use and the information is stored and displayed in a very readable format. The columns are; Event which can be filtered in the dropdown box by screenshot, keyboard event or clipboard value. Date and time of the activity can be filtered by a certain date or between two ranges. Window title lists the name of the window, application lists the tracked process name and value is the keyboard input, clipboard contents or name of the screenshot taken. Any captured screenshots can be clicked on in Detail View to expand and text can be copied.
When the program is minimized, it is sent to the system tray like anything else meaning it will be visible and easily terminated. In ‘Settings’, there is an option to enter ‘Hidden mode’ and hide the tray icon by entering a password. The programs main interface can only then be accessed by pressing the hotkey and entering the chosen password.
If you want to clear the logs and start logging process again, simply navigate to ‘Users\*yourname*\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\Spyrix Free Keylogger\’ and delete the contents of the ‘logs‘ and ‘scr‘ folders. In XP these two folders are located in the ‘Program files‘ folder.
Spyrix Free Keylogger is works with Windows 2000, XP, Vista and 7 32bit/64bit