Normally it’s best to allow everyone their privacy when they’re using a PC. But there may be occasional exceptions. You might legitimately be concerned about the content your kids are accessing online, for instance, or want to confirm that a work PC really is being used for work purposes – and History Viewer may be able to help.

Launch the program and it’ll provide easy access to your various histories for IE, Firefox and Chrome. You’re able to view cookies, URL histories, download details, maybe even form history in some cases, more than enough to give you a very good idea how the browser is being used (unless the key details have been deleted, anyway).

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The program also itemises many Windows histories, including your recently opened documents, recent searches, the programs you’ve launched, and more.

There’s even a USB Storage History section, which details all the storage devices which have ever been connected to your system.

And you get an option to save all this information as an HTML report, which may come in handy if you’re looking to see what’s changed.

The data collected here isn’t particularly in-depth, and if you’re after real forensics power then you’ll be better off with something like OSForensics. If you just want a basic report on a PC’s internet and Windows histories, though, History Viewer provides a quick, free and simple way to get the job done.