Exploring Windows 7 Parental Controls

By Aun on Jul 22 2009 3 Comments

What Is Parental Controls

Parental Controls let parents restrict which games their children can play, which programs they can use, and which websites they can visit ,etc. This feature was originally introduced in Microsoft Windows Vista but was limited to website-filtering capabilities and some other basic features, but the upcoming Windows 7 has added many enhanced features to it. Now, you can easily control and monitor applications, games, emails and instant messaging,  etc. Lets explore how we can use it in Windows 7.

How To Use It

You can access it from Control Panel > User Accounts and Family Safety > Parental Control, a window will be opened as shown in following screenshot.

parental-control

Now, select the account on which you want to add the parental control, click the particular account and a new windows will be opened where you will be presented with the list of options which you can use to enforce rules on the account. set-parental-control

From Time limits option, you can set the time when your child can use the computer, the blue boxes show the blocked time and white boxes show the allowed time to use computer.

time-parental-control

Games option lets you configure which games your child can play.

games

Furthermore, you can also allow or block some specific programs from Allow and block specific program option. It has now become very easy for parents to restrict their children’s computer usage. Enjoy!

  • Anthony

    Very nice tutorial. This is a really good feature.

    I would like to share that if you want additional parental control features, try SafeSquid Personal, a free proxy software. It has a lot of features – like blocking websites based on keyword, enforcing safesearch, allowing time-based access, etc. You can also use other free utilities with safesquid, like url blacklist database from shallalist.de, clam anti virus and log analyzers like Sarg.

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  • Amely Johnson

    THIS DOES NOT HELP WITH TEENAGERS!
    I need to warn the parents, that their children are not stupid. My elder son somehow managed to ovwrcome the described protection. We actually don’t have serious problems with flashing private details or downloading adult contents, but anyway I wanna feel safe. I recommend anyone to buy a special parent-control program. There are loads of them in the net, so you are free to chose, depending on the age of a child or on the seriousness of control. I like Time Boss, cause it has wide range of features, like restriction of access to certain sites only, or like reducton of acess to specified period of time. It, unfortunately, works with Explorer only, but i blockes all the other browsers in my sons account. If you are interested, you can download the programm from here: http://nicekit.com/index.htm/

  • Ken

    I cannot get Parental Controls to work for time settings! I go in to a standard user account and mark the blocked ones as blue. But when I try to log in to that account when it is supposed to be blocked it DOES NOT BLOCK.