Chapter 4. Parental Controls and Family Safety

Keeping kids safe online isn't always easy for parents. Especially for the parent who hasn't exactly been riding the crest of the tech wave in recent years. Parental controls are a great first step to keeping children safe online. Better yet, you don't need to be a computer guru to set parental controls. After you've set up standard user accounts for children (as discussed in Chapter 3), the rest is fairly easy. In this chapter, you see just how easy it is to set up parental controls in Windows 7 and how to extend parental controls with Windows Live.

Before You Get Started

For parental controls to work, your computer must be set up with at least one password-protected administrator user account. If you set up multiple user accounts with administrative privileges, make sure that they're all password-protected. And make sure the kids don't know the password. Otherwise, the kids can easily go in and change any parental controls you import.

Furthermore, each child should have his or her own standard user account. If you have no idea what I'm talking about here, see Chapter 3. There you can learn everything you need to know about setting up user accounts.

Finally, understand that Windows 7 offers a certain set of features for parental control. You can add other features by downloading the Family Safety add-on from Microsoft ...

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