At some point in time everybody’s contact list gets too crowded, no matter how often you clean it up. To make things worse, integrating your social networking accounts can make the People app cluttered with too many names and too much information. Luckily, Windows Phone 8 has a feature named Groups, which enables you to organize the people that matter into groups of contacts that are easily accessible. Let’s see how it works and how to use the Groups feature to keep in touch with your friends and family.

Windows 8’s Family Safety gives you an amazing amount of control over your children’s user accounts. It allows you to monitor their activities, restrict their usage times and prevent them from viewing and using things that aren’t meant for them. This tool is easy to use, but it also has enough going on that it might intimidate some users. We’ve compiled a list with the best features of Family Safety, to show you how it works and why it’s worth the trouble of using it.

Windows 8’s Family Safety allows you to police your children’s user accounts to ensure their safety and innocence while they use the computer. Microsoft provides a helpful web interface for this service that allows you to change your settings, monitor requests from your child to change permissions for pages and apps and monitor reports of your child’s usage. While this is a great feature that is sure to help a lot of users, it isn’t for everyone. If you don’t like the web interface, or would just rather manage your Family Safety reports locally, you have the option to disable the website for your user accounts. Keep in mind that this will disable the ability for your children to send requests from their account(s).

We’ve covered in past tutorials what it takes to set up Family Safety in Windows 8. We’ve also shown you how to use the Family Safety website to check your child’s usage reports from any web connected device anywhere. If you should find, based on your child’s habits or usage, that you want to increase or decrease the permission level on their account, you don’t even have to go home to do it. You can use the same website to change any of your Family Safety settings. Here’s how:

If you’ve been following along with our Family Safety series you’ll know what it takes to get this fantastic feature enabled and configured for your child’s account. Once you’ve enabled web filters, game filters and time limits, you’ll know that you child can’t get into much trouble. Even still, you may still find yourself wondering what they do with their time on the computer. Thanks to the Family Safety website, you don’t have to wonder any more. You can visit the page any time to view usage reports for your child’s account. You can see what pages they’ve visited, what games they’ve played and plenty of other information to ensure they’re computing responsibly.

It will be quite obvious to any first-time user that Windows 8 is very different from previous versions. While the obvious interface changes will be the most talked about, the addition of a number of great security features is really worth getting excited over. Combine new features like early launch anti-malware with oldies like the Windows Firewall and you have an operating system that you can feel secure using.

Having multiple accounts logged in on your Windows 8 computer can make swapping between them faster, but it can also waste system resources as your computer is forced to maintain two separate environments in memory. If you want the chance to weigh the benefits of this action against the costs, the Windows 8 Task Manager can help. Check out the Users tab to view which user accounts are logged in and view how much of your resources are being used to maintain them. You can also use this tool to close the apps opened by another user or even log them out. Let’s see how it works.

We're continuing the series about Family Safety in Windows 8 by showing you how to further its protection by regulating what applications and games children can interact with. Family Safety makes it simple to block any program based on its intended age demographic or title. Take a few minutes to read through and you'll be able to guarantee your kids can't get into anything that they shouldn't.

Windows Phone 8 includes a nice new feature named Kid's Corner, designed to make it easy and safe for parents to share their phone with their children. In this guide, I would like to share what this feature is, how it works and how to use it to safely share content, games and apps with your children.

Do you remember a day when all children wanted to do was get outside and play in the sun? Unfortunately, kids these days are more likely to spend every waking hour perched in front of a computer screen playing games. If you aren’t a fan of this trend and you want to limit your child’s computer use to reasonable hours and time limits, Windows 8 has the tools to help you. Using Family Safety, you can monitor your child’s computer use and prevent him/her from logging in after hours or spending too much time in front of the screen.

While you’ll certainly want your children to be able to take advantage of great things the Internet has to offer, you’ll also want to make sure they avoid the seedier sides of the web. One of the best ways to protect your child while online, is to enable web filtering. This allows you to choose which sites your child may or may not view as well as what sort of material is OK for him or her. Luckily, Windows 8 users don’t need to seek out third party software for this feature, it’s built right into Family Safety. Let’s see how it works.

The Internet is not only home to viruses and spyware, it can also house other threats in the form of child predators or objectionable material that could potentially lead your children to harm. Until your children are old enough to understand the risks of Internet usage, you’ll want to make sure they aren’t doing anything unsafe. Windows 8’s Family Safety features give you the tools you need to monitor their usage, block them from harmful material and even limit how long they spend in front of the computer. In this first article I will share what’s required for enabling Family Safety, how to activate it on the Windows 8 computer used by your child and how to deactivate it when it is no longer useful.