Windows 7: show screensaver with time of most recent activity when workstation is locked

Question

In our company we have shared PCs running on Windows 7, all within on office space. We are twice as much employees than workstations. It happens quite often that someone leaves his desktop locked, gets a coffee and on return, his computer is used by another user.

This is not only annoying for both users, but also since many people remained logged in on workstations at which they do not work anymore. This way, the PC doesn't update etc.

My idea now to fix this problem is the following: as soon as someone leaves their computer, he/she locks the desktop. Right now, the "press ctrl + alt + del to logon"-notification pops up. I would like to have either a screensaver or a any sort of comment displaying the time of most recent activity. That way, the user could select the workstation which was inactive for the longest time.

Alternatively, a script running always in the background on each workstation could report to file on a server the output of quser. (Although quser won't report when a user was active for the last time.)

Do you know any tool which could alleviate this issue with minimal effort, preferably using onboard tools only.

Answer 1

For the Marquee screensaver, the text is stored in HKCU\Control Panel\Screen Saver.Marquee\Text. Other screensavers will store the string in different locations.

One solution would be to create a batch file which writes a message with the current date and time to that registry key:

@echo off
set MSG=Locked at %TIME% on %DATE%
reg add "HKCU\Control Panel\Screen Saver.Marquee" /f /v Text /t REG_SZ /d %MSG%

You then just need to create a scheduled event to run this comment whenever the "lock screen" trigger occurs.