User Accounts and Family Safety

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.

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.

Windows 7 allows you to integrate parental control functions from other software companies (called service providers) with it's 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.

Parental Controls is a feature which was first introduced by Windows Vista. The aim of this tool is to give parents a way to manage the computing activity of their children. With Parental Controls, parents can easily define when children are allowed to use the PC, which games they play, which applications they can use and also block sites with adult content. This tool has been kept in Windows 7 and it was also changed by Microsoft in a couple of ways. In this article I will show how to enable Parental Controls and how to set access rules for your children.