How to Configure and Manage Parental Controls in Windows 7

Mike

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In this presentation, we will discuss how to enable Parental Controls for a user. Enabling Parental Controls is pretty simple. What we want to do is go to the Start Menu under Windows 7, Control Panel, and we have an option under the Category View to Add or Remove User Accounts. At this time, we have an administrator account that is password protected. In order for you to enable Parental Controls on a seperate account, every administrator account should be password protected. This is because, if you do not have the administrator account password protected, the guest, in this case, who would be your child or person that needs Parental Controls will be able to bypass the Parental Controls because you have no password. So make sure that your administrator account is password protected before you try to initiate Parental Controls.​

Now, what we will do, is create a seperate account for our young child Johnny. And we will make sure this is a Standard User. Standard Users differ from Administrators in the fact that they cannot make system-wide changes; they can only make changes that are relevant to their account. They can use and, in many cases, install software, but they cannot make system-wide changes. We create the account, we see that the account is a standard user and is available, and we will now click on the account and set up Parental Controls. Who do we want to set up the Parental Controls for? We want to set up the Parental Controls for Johnny. We want to turn them on. We can do several things now:​

We can control when Johnny can use the computer.
We can set the days/times by dragging our mouse:​

Let's say we only want him to use the computer on weekends, and when we're around. We can go seven on Sunday and seven to seven on Saturday. This is a way of restricting the usage based on time. All you have to then is click OK, and this is the only time Johnny can use the account.​

The other option is to control what games Johnny can play. You can control games completely. You can say no, he can't play any games. You can set game ratings. So let's say you want to use the ESRB ratings, which are the Entertainment Software Rating Board ratings, and you can control which games Johnny can play this way. Or you can block specific games. Right now, we have no games installed on the system. But games that are installed, and registered as games under Windows 7, are able to be moderated.​

You can now allow or block specific programs. This is really where the power of Parental Controls comes to mind. Parental Controls is a good way of managing the control of the system for certain users in a small-sized environment. Not really an enterprise environment, but a small environment. If you wanted to control, say, a whole business of users, you would want to use a Windows Server to make these kind of changes.​

(Video continues)​
 
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