The Launch Of UserAssistView
UserAssistView
Now here’s a program that will make monitoring computer use easy. If you are having trouble monitoring what your kids are up to on the home computer or simply want to monitor how an employee’s computer use, then there no easier tool than UserAssistView. UserAssistView, at 35kb, is quite a small. It works by reading information from your computer’s UserAssist registry.
The UserAssist Registry Key is the where data on when and how often an application is launched, is stored. Whenever you open an application in Windows, the time when this is done is stored in the registry. Information on how often the same application will be used is also logged in the registry. This information is useful to the computer in the sense that the computer will be able to update the Most Recently Used Section of the start menu.
The ‘when’ is seen under the date modified column while the ‘how often’ is seen under the count column in the UserAssistView user interface. The first column is a list of all the applications that have been launched within a particular session. In general UserAssistView will provide you with all vital information concerning a programs use.
UserAssistView headers help you to sort out the data. For instance by clicking on the date modified header, the list of programs displayed will be according to the order of execution. Upon clicking the count header, the list of applications will be according to how often the programs have been launched. However it’s worth noting that ‘how often’ an application is used is not an ideal indicator of ‘how much’ the application is used. For instance a user will only need to launch a browser once and use it till close down.
There is one important thing you should note with UserAssistView. If data in the UserAssist registry is erased, then the application becomes an ineffective monitoring tool. This is the case with registry cleaning software such as CCleaner which will wipe out all data in the registry. However the data will have to be erased every time an application is run.