Introduction

Activity Reporting is a great feature of Windows Vista’s Parental Controls that logs all sorts of usage stats and gives them to you in an easy to read report.

What does Activity Reporting report?

• Web Browsing: Websites visited, and blocked, files downloaded
• System: Logon time stats
• Applications: What software was run and how many times it was run.
• Games: Games played
• Email: Email received and sent, and contact list changes
• Instant Messaging: IM conversations, web cam, audio, game play, file and link exchange, SMS messages, and contact list changes
• Media: Music played, video watch, and so on
• General System: System setting changes, account and time changes, and failed logon attempts

As you can see from the list above, there’s not much someone with Activity Reporting turn on their account can hide.

Turn On Activity Reporting

Note: Before you can turn on Activity Reporting for a user account that account needs to have Parental Controls turned on. Learn how to turn on Parental Controls with the Turn Parental Controls on in Windows Vista ^[1] guide.

1. Open the Start Menu and click Control Panel.
2. Open Parental Controls.
3. Select the user you want to turn Activity Reporting on.
4. Set Activity Reporting to On, collect information about computer usage.

   ^[2]

View an Activity Report

1. Open the Start Menu and click Control Panel.
2. Open Parental Controls.
3. Select the user you want view Activity Reports on.
4. Click View activity reports under their user name and picture.

   ^[2]

How to use the Activity Reports Viewer

The activity reports viewer is very simple and straight forward to use.

^[3]

You can simply scroll down the main screen to view a summary of the usage stats for the current user.

You can go into more detail of any user with activity reporting turned on and your system by clicking the + sign to the left of their folder on the left of the activity reports view to expand different sections.