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W3F charts every program your computer runs. (We know, we know. Dilbert's boss would be in hog heaven if he had a program like this. In fact, there is a professional version which is reported to give additional
information of use to business users.) When we say "every program," we're not kidding. And this has been the problem in the past with programs of this type, they'll tell you that you've run, say, Netscape, but
won't tell you what you run inside Netscape. W3F will.
Which, to my mind, is why it is so valuable. If you've spent four hours writing letters, memos and the like in Word, W3F will be able to recall every document you have used or created. The report above is merely the default, the 29 most-run programs in a given day. You can get all sorts of reports (and even create custom reports as well).
And you can print out all the reports. Special bonus: you can set W3F to print out a report when you shut down Windows. Automatically. So, if you're using W3F to monitor where the kids went, it'll print out the
report and there's not much they can do to stop it. Better, if you see a site and have no idea what it is, you can simply click on the URL in W3F and you will go there. Which brings up what, to me, is the real
benefit to W3F over such programs as Net Nanny and CyberSitter. Programs which lock out Web sites require you to maintain the names of the sites which you want to lock out, or to maintain a list of words you
want to have excluded from browsing. While you can download these lists from the home pages of the companies which sell the programs, the lists can be out of date by days, weeks or a month or two. That means if one of Junior's
friends tells him about a "new site" in school today, the chances are excellent Junior can go home and link to it before the program finds out about it. W3F works on the old principle that the reason the kids go
behind the barn to smoke is because they won't be seen. Rest assurred that if they try to sneak behind the cyber-barn to check out a questionable site, you'll know. Which, generally means they won't. W3F does
give the kids a break. It shows how long they are connected to a site. So, if your little darling blunders into some questionable location, you'll know if they backed right out or stayed a while. We think this
is an excellent way to monitor usage of any web site and, also, to monitor computer usage. Take a test drive and we believe you will be sold, too.
Link to W3F's Web Page.
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