Lock Down Vista with Parental Controls

Category Soft, Vista, Tips & Tricks | Permalink | 12. March 2007

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Won’t someone think of the children?

Microsoft did. Windows Vista comes with powerful and easy-to-use features that anyone can wield to prevent kids and other unauthorized users from accessing all kinds of things. Anybody with an administrator account can prevent users with standard accounts from downloading files, accessing certain games and applications, using the computer at certain times of day, and so on.

Of course, we’re talking about a new operating system and thousands of old programs, so there are bound to be loopholes. Your kid doesn’t have to be a ninja hacker to discover items you’ve overlooked through no fault of your own. For example, sometimes Vista doesn’t recognize a game as being a game, and you have to block it as an application. Further, Vista’s Parental Controls rely upon User Account Control, and it’s only as strong as an administrator’s password.

Parental Controls also fail to offer some content and PC access protections that would have made sense, such as blocking DVD movie content by rating. Want to stop your kids from watching your DVD copy of Porky’s? Put it under lock and key.

Still, Parental Controls are the most user-friendly way to keep kids “safe” from harmful content in Windows, and they can also, in some sense, be used to keep employees from wasting time with games or off-limits Web content (provided they’re using a Vista SKU with Parental Controls; note that Parental Controls are not available in Business Edition).

Parental controls are very easy to use, and they’re well-covered in the Windows Vista help file, so I’m not going to tell you specifically where to click to use them. Instead, I’ll discuss what you can and cannot expect them to help you accomplish in administrating your PC. Continued…

Source :

http://www.extremetech.com

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