Windows Vista Parental Controls

Anyone with children will tell you monitoring their child’s internet activity is vital, and I can’t agree enough. My kids are at the age where they need to access the internet to do research for homework, projects, etc., and I have tried many types of software to monitor or limit their activity. I haven’t found one that I am extremely pleased with, so I welcomed an integrated parental control tool inside Vista.

The parental controls include the ability to limit when the specified account can log on, and I configured it to only allow access at certain times of day for only a certain amount of time. Another feature is the ability to block or allow games based on their ratings, or just block/allow certain games to be played. Similar to that is the application settings, where you can block or allow only specific programs to be used. I set this up to block all chat and instant message programs, as well as a few others. I then spent my spare time testing this account and seeing how the parental controls stack up.

One of the best features to me was the activity reporting. Vista gives you a detailed summary of the websites your child tried to access, what programs or games they used, and much more. This was very helpful in monitoring the activity of your child online.

I have used many applications designed to block and control the content on a designated PC, both freeware and shareware, and I have to say the parental controls built into Windows Vista impressed me the most. They were very easy and straightforward to setup, and were very effective at blocking web content. The parental controls blocked most of the content that parents would find “questionable”, and there were very few times where I could get around the filtering.
[tags]vista, parental controls, internet, microsoft[/tags]