parental controls

[Tom]

I'm setting up my friends computer, windows xp, with 3 accounts. He has the admin account, his gf has hers, and his 3.5 year old son has another.

How do I set it up so that his son's account has zero access to anything dodgy whatsoever, on the internet, accessing the drives, certain programs, etc?

Basically, when his son clicks his account to log in, I want him only to see his games, and maybe some music for wmp9.

Is this possible?

 

[SawTooTH]

Ah you assume he'll only click on his account?

You have kids right?

 

[jaba]

But the other ones will most likely have passwords on so he cant get into them...

try this tom:

http://www.winnetmag.com/WindowsSecurity/Article/ArticleID/39684/39684.html

 

[Tom]

Well I removed everything from the start menu, bar one or two kiddies games, but how do I set it so that when his kid is logged in, IE will not access anything norty? Atm, all the settings affect every user.

 

[Shovel]

Some kind of web proxy is in order. Erm.. all my proxying is done from the router though, so it's a bit hardcore for the 'family computer' setup. That might offer up some Google ideas though.

 

[xane]

I am going to pimp Norton Internet Security here, basically because if you think a "free" solution is going to give peace of mind to a parent, you need to think again.

You get; Norton AV, Norton Firewall (beats Zonealarm Pro any day), plus an ad-blocker, a pop-up blocker and parental security that you can tune to each Windows account, this will block a regularly updated list of norty sites from any user account set as such.

Norton Internet Security costs about £45, you can also download it for less, if you check eBay you can get a full retail version for about half price, it also costs about £20/year to maintain.

It really is a small price to pay, honest, speaking as a parent myself.

Either that or get AOL, but you can't directly associate AOL accounts with Windows accounts.

 

[Tom]

Thanks Xane, sounds like good advice. Its really very silly that windows xp doesn't allow you to filter content depending upon user. The child won't be unsupervised, but children learn very quickly, and it won't be long before he leaves his parents behind in a trail of digits.

 

[xane]

Windows does allow content filtering, but, as you said it is not dependent on account, and it is also very dependent on the websites censoring themselves, this is regardless of what certification system, is used.

The only surefire way is to have an independent database of "naughty" sites rated by a impartial observer, and this will always be something you have to pay for.

I can only state that Norton do update their naughty list regularly, and I have seen it working satisfactorily in the case of my 7yo son, and it can be configured to work with the Windows account.

I am using Norton Internet Security 2003, there is an updated version for 2004 but I have no idea if it is better or worse. I had to pick up a second copy of 2003 the other day and got one from eBay for £10 (includes 1 year subscription).