THOUGH BILLED AS A PRODUCT FOR MONITORING AND reporting on employees' computer activity, PC Activity Monitor Professional (PC Acme Pro) is basically a simple keylogger with an unsophisticated reporting facility. You can't, for example, replay screenshots taken from client workstations, as you can with competitors like Spector 360. But small businesses with limited needs for tracking computer use may find the product's simplicity attractive.

Despite a lack of documentation, the client-monitoring and server-management software (both run under Microsoft Windows 2002 imd XP) installed quickly. They won't, though, if you have many workstations-you have to run the client installer from each. Initiating monitoring from the server proves cumbersome, too. Unlike Spector 360, PC Acme Pro gives no choice over what to monitor and can't generate alerts based on keywords or activities.

Bare-bones reports show what programs ran for how long on which PCs and the keys typed in each app. You can search for text strings in the logged keystrokes, and in reports you can see the characters entered into a logged program by clicking on its filename-pretty primitive capabilities. Because of its simplicity, PC Activity Monitor Professional might prove useful if you want to try out employee monitoring. But once you hit about 13 licenses, the steep per-user cost eclipses what you'll pay for the far more feature-rich Spector 360. You're better off with the latter