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As parents, we now have to worry about not only strangers approaching our children at school or on the playground, but we also have to be concerned about strangers approaching our children online. With social networking sites, emails, and role playing games abundant on the internet it can be incredibly difficult to track our child's movements and protect them.

With the parental control feature found in Windows Vista, we can use our operating system to help monitor our children online, keep them from sites that as parents we feel are unsafe, and even keep them offline when they have too much school work to do!

The parental control feature is found in the User Accounts and Family Safety section of the control panel. Choose the account you'd like to have parental controls added to and choose "On, enforce current settings" and "On, collect information about computer usage". Once you've selected these features you can move onto choosing the settings you'd like to enforce.

~Windows Vista Web Filter
The web filter allows you to determine what sites are safe or unsafe for your child. You can block some sites or allow everything. If you'd only like to block social networking sites, choose "Allow or Block specific websites". This takes you to a new screen where you can enter www.myspace.com and choose block. Do this for all of the websites you'd like to ensure your child can't access. You can do the opposite for sites you'd like for your child to see. By typing in www.cnn.com and choosing allow, your child will be able to visit CNN online. If you would like Vista to decide what websites to allow access to, you can skip manually entering them and choose a level of protection for your child instead. By choosing Medium, all unrated content, including pornography, drugs, hate speech and weapons, will be blocked. The last option allows you to block downloads.

~Time Limits
The time limit controls let you choose what time your child can be on the computer. Simply click on the times you'd like to disallow access and they'll turn blue. Anytime that isn't highlighted in blue will be the time your child is allowed to login to the computer.

~Game Controls
Here, you can limit what sort of games your child can play on the computer. If you choose No, that they aren't allowed to play games, then all options turn gray and no game will be playable under your child's login name. If you choose Yes, they can play some games, then you'll be able to specify settings.

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