What it is:
Project Fred is an entirely pointless program which counts the number of keys you press and the number of times you click your mouse, and uploads these totals to the Project Fred website. You can then compare how much you've been banging the keyboard with other users.
Download Fred by choosing one of the following links (currently Windows XP or later only):
32bit installer 32bit zip 64bit installer 64bit zip
If you haven't installed Fred before, download and run the installer. If you want to update Fred to a newer version, you can either download the latest installer, or just download the corresponding zip and extract it to your Fred installation directory.
How it works:
First, create an account on the Project Fred website.
Then, download the client program and extract it to a location of your choice. Once you've done this, run the ProjectFred.exe program. You should see a new Fred icon in the system notification area of your taskbar.
Click the Fred icon in the notification area, and select 'View settings'. Here you can enter the username and password that you used to register on the Project Fred website. You can choose to have Fred autosubmit events periodically, or you can manually submit events whenever you like, by choosing 'Submit' from Fred's menu.
To check your stats, choose the 'View stats' option in the menu. To compare your stats against other users, log in to the Project Fred website.
You can submit from up to two computers with each user account. If you are submitting from two computers, please make sure that you set one computer as 'Computer 1' and the other as 'Computer 2' in the settings screen. If both computers are set to either 'Computer 1' or 'Computer 2' then your submissions will not reflect correctly.
Project Fred also allows you to create and join teams. All submissions made while you're a member of a team will accumulate towards that team's total. So not only can you compare how much keyboard banging you've been doing against other users, you can get your friends to join your team, so you can all compare how much keyboard banging you've been doing against other teams!
You can also add nifty images like these ones to forum signatures and so on. Your own personal dynamically-generated Fred signature image can be found at
http://fred.dhiren.za.net/sigs/<your+fred+username+here>.png
Please submit all bugs, suggestions, and general feedback to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
Things to know:
Currently, Fred only works on Windows XP and Windows Vista. Other operating systems will be supported at a later stage. Fred currently cannot submit through a proxy server that requires authentication, e.g. Microsoft ISA proxy server. Support for authenticating proxy servers will be added in a future version. However, you can still accumulate your keystrokes and mouseclicks and submit them once ISA proxy server support is available. If you attempt to tamper with the event counter data, it is quite possible that your submission will be rejected, or that your client will reset its data to zero, losing all accumulated counters. Since Fred is just for fun, there is nothing to gain by attempting to cheat the system.
Privacy information:
For those of you who are (quite rightly) concerned about privacy, Fred only counts keystrokes, and doesn't log them at all. You can confirm this in a few ways. Firstly, Fred doesn't directly write to any files on disk, it only writes to the registry. You can examine the info stored in Fred's registry key and verify that the data stored there does not grow as you type, it merely changes to update the counters. Also, you can examine the traffic sent from Fred to the website, and verify that it is only sending counter information, and nothing more.
This is probably also a good place to mention that your registration details are entirely safe, and will never be disclosed to any third parties.
