I finally got to work on my first Vista computer, a Dell desktop with Vista Premium installed, along with the other junker software that all systems seem to come with now. The job was to hook up all of the components and transfer files over from the old system.
I recently was sent a Belkin USB cable in a promo kit for Vista and I thought this would be a great first test. The files transfer went without a hitch and the Belkin provided software worked flawlessly. Once I cleaned off the junk, the owner asked me about parental controls that she had read about in one of the trade magazines and how good it was. So we agreed to give it a try, using her 9 and 13 year old as guinea pigs.
I sent up two accounts for each of her kids. Talk about easy. This is a real no brainer and a pleasure to use. Microsoft has done a great job making this easy to use, and any parent should not have any problems setting it up. Also of not, if you do not have a Administrative password, you must create one before using Parental Controls. Here are the options as selected:
- Parental Control was set to enforce and Activity Reporting was enabled so she could view where the surfing has taken place.
- Time limits were also invoked, in which her kids could surf the Internet only during specified times.
- Games setting was set to the Teen rating and the Mom invoked some of the Gore settings so this type of game could not be played.
- And a Internet rating system scheme was randomly selected, just to test it.
We are going to give this a two week test period and then review the report and make adjustments as necessary. The Parental Controls were activated on February 14, 2007 so I’ll be checking back with her on February 28, 2007 and see how well or not so well Parental Controls worked.
Till then.
[tags]vista, parental controls, test, [/tags]