LastActivityView – Create a Log of The Last Actions Made by the User

06/04/2013
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LastActivityView is a small, portable and freeware application designed to instantly collect system information and create a log that is easy to understand and records many of the actions performed by the user on the computer.
As a technician, your job is hard enough from diagnosing and solving complex computer issues to virus and spyware removal, and being accused of creating complications with a client’s computer is something you really don’t want to hear on a Monday before having your morning coffee. You can make your job a little easier by using LastActivityView to quickly generate a report showing the last actions that the user did and that the client was the one who downloaded the virus and not you.

LastActivityView is an amazing program, coming in at less than 100kb, it can easily become part of your toolkit when visiting a client. LastActivityView can report a lot of information from when .exe files were run, when programs were installed or updated to software crashes and blue screens, as well as when software has stopped responding and so much more. This can be very useful to see what the client is doing to create a problem that keeps occurring. A full list of actions and events that are recorded are available from the developer’s website below.

LastActivityView gathers information from various sources including the Registry, Windows Events Log, Prefetch folder, Minidump folder and other areas on the computer. Some known limitations with this program are that the accuracy and availability of some data may be different from system to system. An example of this is that the date of some actions performed may appear to be more recent if the associated registry keys were edited, as the program reports the day the registry entries were modified instead of when they were created in some cases.

A great part about LastActivityView is that is is compatible with many previous versions of Windows, going all the way back to Windows 2000 and up to the latest version, Windows 8, supporting both 32-bit and 64-bit systems. Another great feature of LastActivityView is that you can quickly search for actions by filename, date and file path, allowing you to quickly find what you need.

The reports generated by LastActivityView can easily be exported to a spreadsheet in csv, tab-delimited and xml formats, as well as to an html file. Alternatively, you can simply copy and paste the data into Microsoft Excel or other software. This export functionality allows you to take reports with you to review at a later time, or provide them as a service to your clients while explaining what happened to help them better understand what they did and how it affected their computer.