User Accounts and Family Safety

I bet very few of our readers have heard about the Credential Manager, let alone know what it is and how to use it. I did not know that much either, even though I was aware of its existence. That's why, this tutorial tries to demystify the Credential Manager, show how to use it and explain why it is important to your Windows computing experience.

After showing you how to create or delete user accounts, and also how to edit a user account in Windows 7, we focused our attention towards those of you who also have the tough job of being a parent. With this article we are going to make a short summary of our parental controls series, which covered to tools you need to use in order to have control over the computing activities of your children.

If your child uses Windows Live Hotmail, Windows Live Messenger and Windows Live Spaces, with Windows Live Family Safety you can manage the list of people he/she gets in contact with via these services. For example, you can see the entire list of contacts and add or remove people from it. Your child can also make requests for adding new contacts or accessing websites which are currently blocked. You will receive these requests and you will be able to allow or deny them. While this sounds a bit controlling, these features can help you to make sure that your child is not in contact with unwanted strangers over the Internet. If you want to know more about this subject, click on read more.

Windows Live Family Safety can record & report the activity that your child has on his/her computer both online and offline. In this tutorial I will show how you can see the websites he/she has visited and block them if you think they are inappropriate. Then, I'll show how to view statistics like: how many times you child has logged in and amount of hours spent at the computer, the list of programs ran, the files downloaded and the games played.

We continue our previous article on Enhancing Parental Controls with Windows Live Family Safety with a tutorial on how to setup web filtering. Web filtering means setting up what kind of pages you allow your children to visit. With Windows Live Family Safety you are able to select between pre-defined sets of settings but you may also add your custom exceptions. In this tutorial I will show everything you can do on the web filtering side.

Windows 7 allows you to integrate parental control functions from other software companies (called service providers) with its own. While many security solutions providers offer parental control applications, one of the best solutions comes from Microsoft and it is called Windows Live Family Safety. This application can be installed on top of your Windows 7 installation and allows you to filter web sites, access activity reports which tell you what your children are doing on their computers, administrate the contacts with whom they communicate, allows children to ask permissions to access different web sites that you have already blocked, etc. In this article I will show you where to download Windows Live Family Safety from, how to enable it and manage the user accounts which you want to monitor.

In our previous article on How to Setup Parental Controls, I've mentioned that Windows Media Center also offers a series of parental controls. You can define an access code for restricted content and parental controls menus, with which you can block TV programs and movies that exceed a maximum rating that you can set, protecting your children of inappropriate content. In this tutorial I will show you how to do all of these, starting with where to find Windows Media Center and sharing everything you need to know about how to filter the content viewed by your children.