Nowadays computers became important attribute of our lives, and are used for study, work and entertainment. That is why children are taught how to use computers at an early age. But being an unlimited open source of information, computers might harm your children. Child Control software is designed to reduce to minimum all negative effects of using computer by children.

Installation of the program is very simple, and consists of two typical steps: acceptance of the license agreement and selection of the folder to install the program.

The program has easy but powerful design:

At first startup of the program you will be asked to enter a password that will forbid other users to access the program. I recommend to choose such a password, that on the one hand is not too simple for your children to know it, and on the other hand is not too difficult to remember, because the control of the program is impossible without knowing the password.

Initial setup of the program can be performed fast and easy in Wizard in four steps. The settings (limitations of using PC by users) are applied to the selected user accounts registered on the computer.

In the first step of the Wizard total time limits for using PC and Internet are set, thus providing good protection of your children from negative influence of computer on health, especially on eyesight:

In the next step the time of day when it is allowed to turn on the computer and to have access to Internet is being defined. This feature helps to control the daily activity of your child, because after that you will not need to control every evening if your child is already in bad or still playing some new computer games.

In the third step of the Wizard Internet Filter can be activated. This filter limits access to the websites with offensive content. Here also you can set a white list of websites which are always opened to access. By default, there are two websites in this list, and I consider them to be useful - cnn.com and wikipedia.org:

There is no functionality to delete websites from the list here in the Wizard, but this can be done later in general settings of the program.

In the last fourth step the user accounts to which you want to apply the settings are selected. Additionally this window has one quite interesting option Security Level. Here you need to set the level of knowledge of a particular user to work with computer (from Low to Very High). It probably helps the program to choose the optimal methods of operation with every user in order to provide effective protection.

All the settings listed above for the Wizard can be changed or set in more detail in the main window of the program. The settings are grouped in categories, and can be accessed by pressing the buttons in column on the left of the main window.

For example, in the section ON/OFF Times you can set exact hours for each day of week when a user is allowed to log in. Allowed time is marked green:

If the user logs in during a not-allowed login-time, immediately after startup he/she will be informed about it and automatically logged out:

In other sections of settings you may also allow/forbid to run programs, hide some system settings (Run, Registry Editor, Task Manager, etc.), set up Internet Content Control (performs filtering of Internet pages by rating categories and bad keywords), and limit access of a user to some folders in the system. Moreover, in the section Log Files you can see what a particular user was doing in the last day/month.

Thus, Child Control is a convenient tool to administrate the user accounts on a home PC. And in contrast with built-in standard Microsoft tools, all the settings in the program are collected in one place and can be easily understood not only by system administrators, but also by users.

It is difficult to estimate the reliability of the program, because children are always very creative and can try to go around the limitations. But in any case, even if your child attempts to break the limitations of the program, it has a positive influence, because at the same time he/she becomes more advanced in computer technologies.

To conclude, I consider this program to be very useful, because it helps to control activities of your children fairly and without unnecessary conflicts. Direct prohibition to work with computer in its turn could harm your child and limit his/her development in modern world.

To test the program for yourself you can download trial version of the program from the developer's website that works for 30 days without any limitations. Single license (for one PC) for Child Control 2006 costs 29.90 USD.

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