AutoScreenShot helps you monitor PC use by taking regular screenshots

If you’d like to keep an eye on your kids’ PC activities then you could pay big money for a full-strength parental controls package, with comprehensive monitoring tools, detailed reports and a whole lot more.

If your needs are more basic, though, you could just download AutoScreenShot, a tiny free tool which will save regular screenshots which you can review later.

The program is easy to configure. Options start with choosing the capture interval, for instance (once every 120 seconds, by default), and the folder where your images will be stored.

You can tell the program to keep only the most recent images, too -- the last 200, say -- which helps to keep drive space requirements in check.

When you’re done, click the OK button, and that’s it -- the captures will begin. There’s no immediately obvious sign of the program’s presence, and it tied up only minimal resources (under 6MB of RAM on our test PC, even with the configuration dialog open). Add it to your startup folder and you’ll have a very simple monitoring system.

We say "simple" because AutoScreenShot isn’t exactly difficult to bypass. If anyone checks your startup programs, or Task Manager, they’ll find AutoScreenShot.exe, and browsing your screenshot folder will reveal exactly what it’s doing.

There are some technical irritations, too. If the program is running without a system tray icon, for instance, then you can’t access the Options dialog any more. To tweak any settings you have to manually edit its Options.ini file, or delete this and restart the process. This isn’t a critical issue -- there aren’t that many settings and you may never need to change any of them -- but it’s still annoying.

AutoScreenShot is also free and easy to use, though, and if you just want to monitor novice or non-technical users, or would like the screen grabs for some other reason, then the program may still be useful. Take a look.