If multiple individuals use your computer, such as your family members or business employees, you may want to monitor the usage. Or, if you have staff members with their own laptops or desktops, knowing what's on that computer and what it's being used for can help protect your information or that of your company and your privacy. It can also help you to ascertain what family members and employees are really doing when spending time offline or online.

Perhaps you are concerned about the surfing habits of your teenager with respect to profanity, pornography or illegal behavior. Maybe you want to protect your children from doing things they shouldn't be doing online such as chatting with strangers or downloading potentially harmful files.

Or, it could be that you are concerned about what your spouse might be doing online and feel you need to know exactly what's happening to rule out an affair or immoral habits.

There are programs that run discreetly in the background that will help you by reporting to you exactly what is going on with your computer. If you want exact keystrokes, copies of e-mails or other files sent, instant messaging transcripts or a log of how much time is spent, you can obtain all of this information.

If you need passwords retrieved, e-mail addresses captured or any other information from your computer regardless of log in credentials used to access the program, you can obtain this information from a number of programs. If you use this program and your computer crashes or becomes corrupt, this could save you countless hours rewriting documents or other information that was not saved.

There are basic features that anyone can use to pull this information from their computer as well as advanced reports for more detailed information.

If you would like random snapshots of the screen to see what's going on, this is completely possible to do with your own computer or any computer you install it on. You can obtain the report from that computer or remotely via e-mail.

If you need to monitor your employees, to determine who's working and who is simply spending company time to play games, check their emails or chat, you can find this out.

Monitoring the use of your computer can bring peace of mind if you suspect that anyone is using the computer for things that they shouldn't be doing. It can also save you productivity and profit if used in business.