Concerned parents want to protect their children. Because the Internet opens a new world of information gathering, communication, commerce, productivity, and entertainment, it presents new risks for information disclosure, and easy access to inappropriate content in websites, messages, file downloads, games, and audio/video multimedia.
Parental controls are not available if your computer is connected to a domain. In addition, parental controls are applied only to standard user accounts, not administrative accounts. Of course, you will need an administrator user account to enable and configure parental controls.
To turn on parental controls for a standard user account, follow these steps:
- Open parental controls by clicking the Start button, Control Panel, and then, under User Accounts, click Set Up Parental Controls. If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, enter the password or provide confirmation.
- Click the standard user account for which you want to set parental controls.
- Under Parental Controls, click On.
- After you have turned on parental controls for your child's standard user account, you can adjust the individual settings that you want to control (see Figure 3.15). You can control the following areas:
Figure 3.15 Parental controls.
- Web restrictions. You can restrict the websites that children can visit, make sure children visit only age-appropriate websites, indicate whether you want to allow file downloads, and set up which content you want the content filters to block and allow. You can also block or allow specific websites.
- Time limits. You can set time limits to control when children are allowed to log on to the computer. Time limits prevent children from logging on during the specified hours and, if they are already logged on, they will be automatically logged off. You can set different logon hours for every day of the week.
- Games. You can control access to games, choose an age rating level, choose the types of content you want to block, and decide whether you want to allow or block unrated or specific games.
- Allow or block specific programs. You can prevent children from running programs that you don't want them to run.
After you've set up parental controls, you can set up activity reports to keep a record of your child's computer activity.