I’m sure my younger sister keeps using my computer even though I’ve told her not to. Is there any way I can find out if my computer is being used while I’m away?

Mike, maybe you need to settle your differences with you sister and learn to share. After all, the computer, the exercise equipment and even your football is a family resource and is meant to be shared. Anyway, back to your question, there’s a simple way to find out if someone has been using your computer, you can ask it to send you an email every time it is switched on. Here’s how to do it:

First of all you need to find the Task Scheduler. Click on your Start button, navigate to All Programs, Accessories and System Tools. Once you’re there, click on Task Scheduler to open the application that will do the work for you. Once this is open, click on “Create Basic Task”

Give your task a Name and Description

Specify a trigger for your task. In this case we want the task to fire when the computer starts up.

Specify the action for this; in this case we want to send an email.

You now need to configure the emal you would like sent. You’ll need to specify the From, To, Subject and Text fields as required. More importantly, you’ll need to specify an SMTP server so that the email can be sent. This is the same one that your email is configured to use.

Once you’ve specified all that, you’ll be presented with a confirmation screen to confirm all your options.

There you go, your task is now configured and set to go. Next time someone logs into your machine, you’ll get an email letting you know exactly when it happened.