I just received an email from Mike:

Hi, I have a 10-year-old daughter, and I’m concerned that she might be doing some shady things on her computer. I was told about “Intelliadmin” to discreetly watch her computer from my own on the same network. Is this something you can provide? Please give me some information… and keep in mind that I’m not a tech whiz!

While it is true that our remote control product could be used for this purpose, I don’t recommend it. First of all the mouse will flicker with some video cards. Why? Because we need to capture alpha-blended windows in applications like Outlook. A side effect of this is the flicker. I don’t think it would take very long to figure out that someone was on their computer with that going on. Secondly, it would be overkill, since many of the features in our product are targeted at IT administrators – and using it in this way could be replaced by free alternatives.

So what is a good program to use? A while a go a friend of mine needed to do exactly what Mike asked, and after my research I came up with a program called Spector Pro from http://www.spectorsoft.com/ (No they are not paying me to write this article). I was very impressed with what it could do.

Here are a some of the things it can monitor

-Actual records of screen movements during the entire time of usage (It is very efficient with this since it only records when the user is moving the mouse or typing on the keyboard)

-Chat/IM Activity

-All Keystrokes typed

-MySpace / Facebook activity

-Online searches

-Email Activity

-Program Activity

-Websites Visited

The best part? You can install the application, and then put it into stealth mode. In stealth mode it is very difficult for someone to find out that it is running . You are given a magic key combination that will bring the program back…and you can then replay the entire recorded session.

If you need to monitor computer usage, or know someone who does, I definitely recommend this program. It is a well designed product.

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