The dongle Allen KEYKatcher 64K ($79 direct) is about the size of a PS/2 adapter and records up to about 65,000 keystrokes of data on flash memory. We installed the KEYKatcher in an unlocked office in 20 seconds. The biggest obstacle we encountered was dust bunnies.

To retrieve the data—either at the machine being monitored or at your own computer after retrieving the KEYKatcher—we just typed a configurable password into Microsoft Wordpad to call up the KEYKatcher's simple interface, which let us look at raw keystrokes. A search function helps find keywords, and another feature isolates occurrences of http, www, .com, and .net.