Home Technology Services

Setting up Parental Controls on Vista – Part 1

Gary — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 11:10:34 +0000

In a previous article, I walked you through how to setup a limited account for each child that may use a PC. This protects them from doing too much damage to your PC and also isolates their data and preferences from other users.

Now I want to show you how to turn on Parental Control in Vista for each of your children’s accounts so that you can limit what they see on the internet, what rating of games they can play, when they can actually use the computer and which applications they have access to. This guide is pretty much the same for Windows 7 but if you have Windows XP, you should check out your Anti-Virus package to see if it offers Parental Control or take a look at K9, which is a free application for XP users. I will do a walk though of K9 in a later post

So to start with, we need to bring up the Control Panel from the Start button in the bottom left hand corner of your screen – as shown below

Next, we need to click on “Setup parental controls for any user” from within the User Accounts and Family Safety section (top right in the image above)

Here I am going to click on Patrick’s account to setup the limitations I would like to protect his account

Once you click on the radio button next to “On, enforce current settings”, then the other options will become active (not greyed out as shown above) and we can set them as we like.

Click Here for part 2 – configuring the limits

How to manage your passwords securely

Gary — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 10:43:41 +0000

Many of the sites that we interact with online require us to divulge some degree of personal information and to create an account that we subsequently login to every time we revisit. This may be to access content or information that manages some service or other or it may be to simply personalise that website to your preferences based on profiling or demographics.

What we should of course NOT do is use the same password for all of our sites. Ideally, each site should have a different password but that becomes very difficult to manage and tiresome. However, banking sites, online shopping, social networking, email access – all these should have distinct passwords and that is where it all gets a bit complicated.

However, help is at hand as there are a number of solutions out there to managing all of your passwords. Some browsers such as Firefox and Internet Explorer have password managers built into them but I have been using a 3rd party application from Siber Systems called Roboform for over 8 years.

I was initially pretty cautious about what sort of data I “trusted” it to know about me and kept an ear to the ground with respect to security issues or privacy violations. I never came across any so i gradually increased my trust in the application to the point where I now have all my banking and credit card information stored in its encrypted “vault”.

Now, whenever I want to login to my bank, I just click on its appropriate passcard from the toolbar built into IE or Firefox and Roboform takes me to the login page, enters my credentials and submits my login – just like that. But before you shout, “Hang on a minute! That isn’t very secure.”, let me explain that no-one can access any of the data held within Roboform without entering a long and complicated password. This is the only password I have to remember so it needs to be memorable but it also grants access to everything on my PC so it does have at least 12 characters with capitals, punctuation, and numbers.

To learn more about Roboform, please visit their site at www.Roboform.com – I highly recommend it.

Create new user account for a child

Gary — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 23:08:14 +0000

It is recommended that every child in the household that will use a PC should have their own account and logon. This allows you as the parent to set certain limitations on what they can do. It also prevents them from changing the way you have iTunes setup or from gaining access to your financial details.

In this article, I will be doing a step-by step guide to creating a new user account (in Vista but Win 7 is very similar) and there will be a follow up article on how to activate and configure parental controls for each child.

So let’s get started by heading over to the start menu and bringing up the Control Panel.

Once the Control Panel opens, we need to head over to User Accounts and Family Safety and click on “Add or Remove accounts”

This will bring up the User Management screen

Clicking on the “Create a new account” link towards the bottom of the window will bring up this page

It is recommended to use a “Standard” account for children as this limits the damage they can do to your applications and operating system. It is also necessary if you want to use Parental Controls as if they have Administrative access, they can turn off Parental Control.

Once you have the new account like we have here

You will want to add a password. It is good practice for children to use a password to login to their PC – it also protects their files from the prying eyes of siblings!

So click on the new account and you will be presented with these options

Now click on “Create a password” to see this screen

NOTE: Whatever you put into the password hint box will be visible by any user of the PC so don’t make it obvious

Once you press “Create Password” at the bottom in blue, you new account is now active and your child can login. However, before you let them loose on the PC, it would be worth applying some limit to what they can and cannot do. See the accompanying article here that explains how to activate Parental Controls in Vista and Windows 7.

Bye for now.

Gary Atkinson