A friend of mine came up to me today and asked me if there was a way to keep a history of system usage so he knows how long people are logged in for as well as how many run hours each system in the fleet of systems accumulates.

I told him that if he wanted to know how many run hours the system has had, that he could use a utility to read in the number of hours the hard drive has been running and that's a pretty safe assessment of how many hours the system was actually powered SINCE these workstations probably are not set to putting the HDD into a rest state while idle, so they are probably spinning for the whole time that the system is booted.

I also told him that I know of a easy method to keep track of who logs on when, but that I am unsure of how you would gather the logoff time of the users, and so you could see how many different times during the day a specific user logged on and at what times, but that I am not aware of an easy method to log the logout as for a process would probably have to run at logoff or shutdown to record this event. I would think that you would either need a service that is monitoring another service to test to see if the system is active, and when this special service detects the loss of a service that it is monitoring, it then knows that its a logoff or shutdown and it then writes this to the log for that user of which is either logging off of shutting down the computer for the day.

I shared with him this batch that can be used to record when people are logging in, by placing it into the startup folder to run at logon, in which each user is given a different user ID # and log file to write to, such as Bob = User1 and would have the following batch in the startup of his profile

@echo. ------------------------------ >>c:\UserActivityLogs\user1.log
@echo. %date% at %time% >>c:\UserActivityLogs\user1.log

And Jim = User2 and he would have a batch like this ONE LOCATED in his startup location of profile

@echo. ------------------------------ >>c:\UserActivityLogs\user2.log
@echo. %date% at %time% >>c:\UserActivityLogs\user2.log

He was hoping that I knew of a free or inexpensive solution vs having to get some information from crystaldiskinfo for smart data from local hard drives and other data from a batch process that runs quickly at logon to log the date and time that a user logged on.

Anyone have any solutions, either a batch method, other coded programming method, or an already available software utility out there that can give him the information that he is trying to gather?

I guess from what he was telling me, his boss wants to know the logon/logoff behavior to know who requires computer access more than others, and the computer runtime info which could be gathered from the HDD smart data with system run hours which can be viewed through a HDD utility such as crystaldiskinfo to figure out who should be issued the newer systems of the next fleet of computers to put in place.

I stated that shouldn't you just figure out what systems are slower or older than others and go that route of replacing them, this way your pulling out the lesser productive systems from the fleet of systems and replacing them with new, and then the next go around for system replacements you can then target what is now the slower/older systems and replace them that way, as well as anyone with very important roles with computer access be given the new systems as a priority of issue, and their prior systems if they are worthy of being retained, then given to someone else who it might be an upgrade for, and get rid of that other persons slower/older computer.

He stated that they bought 230 systems all at the same time 4 years ago, a bunch of HP Business Class SFF systems, and so there is no weaker or older system in the mix, as for they are all the same processors and just a few of them would have more RAM than the others, so because they have 230 systems and are buying 50 new systems for 2015 as APPROVED for the next year upgrade, they instead of just deciding randomly who should get the newer HP EliteDesk 800 G1 Business Class Core i5 systems to replace the Pentium E5200 Dual-Cores of the HP DC7900's at a cost around $42,500 USD are trying to go about the distribution of the new systems strategically to place the more powerful workstations in locations where productivity may be able to be improved with users not having to wait for outlook and other apps to open etc.

I told him as far as productivity goes... you cant rule out that someone is just surfing the web instead of doing their job during that time though right and so if you have someone who uses the corporate systems for other than business, they might get a upgrade out of this instead of a true worker who is processing paperwork when away from the computer etc, who would be the better choice for a faster system.

He laughed and said that fortunately they have only had a few users do that and they have been warned not to use the corporate systems for their own computer use. He said that the biggest issue today is not the users using the corporate systems wasting productivity surfing the web etc, but that because so many people have portable devices these days, they can essentially text or surf on their own service and unless someone catches them doing this, they get away with it and it definitely affects productivity and quality of work when their mind is not in their work but elsewhere.