We recently published a detailed guide to parental controls. If you take a look at the parental controls feature in Windows 7, you’ll notice that it doesn’t have the web content filtering and activity reporting feature found in some versions of Vista.
If you want web content filtering in your Windows 7 PC then you need to install Windows Live Family Safety. This guide tells you how to do that.
Set up Windows Live Family Safety
Windows Live Family Safety is a free tool from Microsoft that allows you to set up web filters and monitor your child’s activity on the internet with the help of a few settings.
Here are the steps.
First, download and install Windows Live Family Safety on your computer. Open it and you will get a screen like in the screenshot below. Now enter your Hotmail/Windows Live credentials (If you don’t have a Windows Live ID, click the signup link and create one).
After successful login, it will show you all user accounts. Select the account you want to follow by checking the box next to it. Click the “Save” button.
A setup window will appear.
In the next step click on the familysafety.live.com link provided at the bottom. It will redirect you to your live account family safety page on Internet explorer.
View activity reports
On the Family Safety page opened in your browser, you can click “View Activity Report” to see all of your child’s activities.
Below is a screenshot of the activity report. You can set the date on which you want to see the activities and click the “Show Activity” button. All reports are divided into three tabs – “Web Activity, Other Internet Activity and Computer Activity (not shown in screenshot)”. It also shows the programs used by your child between certain dates.
On the left you can find different tabs. Note the Web Filtering tab in the left pane. Click it to set up a web filter.
Web filtering
You can filter sites by rating (Strict, Basic and Custom). These ratings are created by the Family Safety team, which reviews thousands of websites and assigns categories to them.
If you want your child to not browse adult content, you can select the “Basic” category. You can also select Custom Category and apply filter by choosing different given options.
How to allow or block a specific website
You can also set options to allow or block specific websites.
Enter the website’s address in the given box and click the “Allow” or “Block” button next to it. There is also a box that says “Allow Children to Download Files Online”. This can be used to forbid your child from downloading files from the internet.
So that’s how you configure Windows Live Family Safety to add an extra layer of supervision to parental controls in Windows 7. However, it’s not a perfect solution and there are ways to get around it. However, if your child is not very computer savvy (very unlikely ???? ), this is a pretty good way to control their internet activities.
Categories: How to
Source: thpttranhungdao.edu.vn/en/
