Auto Keybot

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on December 01, 2011

Have you ever had to keep pressing the space bar or Enter key to keep a program or window from closing? Most PC users have, at some point. Bet you wished there was an easier way, too. There is, and it's called Auto Keybot. This simple, portable tool can automate mouse clicks and keystrokes and send them to any window you choose. It will keep clicking or typing until you tell it to stop. It's free to try and cheap to buy, if you like it. And, since it's portable, you can take it along with you on a USB drive and use it on any compatible Windows PC (98 to 7).

Auto Keybot's user interface has been updated with a progress bar and a random pause feature. The program sports an efficient, gridded layout with the progress bar, random pause counters, and start and stop time counters on top and a gridded main view below, separated by a row of controls for adding, inserting, and deleting commands. A drop-down menu let us configure Auto Keybot for a lot of useful locations such as our inbox, Start menu, and Program Manager. By default it's set to Auto Keybot Trial, which displays two preconfigured Send Strings to activate either the Space or Enter keys every 5 seconds. To activate either, we simply had to select it and press Start, and then Stop when we were done. We could also select mouse clicks instead of keystrokes. Of course, we wanted to see how easy it is to create our own macros. Thanks to a preconfigured list of commands, the answer is "very easy." We could select Alt, Delete, Pause, Up, Down, Right, Left, and many more. We could enter the number of repeats and pauses and add a Comment describing the command. To save and reload your macros, you must buy the full version.

The program's Help file describes some of the tasks it can automate, such as sending e-mail, turning off screensavers, and automating any Windows program. The full version enables long scripts as well as the ability to save your macros.