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Microsoft Vista Notes Home Page
Lesson 1: Configuring and Troubleshooting Parental Controls and Content
Advisor
151
Lesson 1: Configuring and Troubleshooting Parental
Controls and Content Advisor
Parental Controls lets parents decide how their children use the computer.
As an IT profes-
sional you might be asked to advise parents on how to configure Parental
Controls or to con-
figure the facility for less computer-aware parents. You might need to
answer more general
questions related to Internet safety and safety strategies. This is one of
the most significant
areas of concern that purchasers of home computers have and they often need
a lot of infor-
mation and reassurance. You might also need to configure restrictions for
your own children.
MORE INFO Internet safety
For more information on Internet safety, you should seriously consider
purchasing the book “Look
Both Ways: Help Protect Your Family on the Internet” by Linda Criddle and
Nancy Muir (Microsoft
Press, 2006) and reading it carefully. This inexpensive paperback gives you
a lot of information that
will help you in your chosen career. It might also help you protect your own
children.
Schools can also use Parental Controls to limit the web content, games, and
programs that
pupils can access on a per-child basis, although they are more likely to ask
you to limit access
to certain types of web content on a per-machine basis, in which case you
would configure
Content Advisor.
You can configure Parental Controls to set limits on children’s access to
the web, the hours
that they can log on to the computer, and which games they can play and
programs they can
run. When Parental Controls blocks access to a webpage or game, the computer
displays a
notification. The child can click a link in the notification to request
permission for access to
that webpage or program. A responsible adult who has an account with
administrator creden-
tials can then allow access by entering a password. Thus a parent can
control what his or her
children can access.
Content Advisor, a separate feature from Parental Controls in Windows Vista,
works with web-
sites that supply content ratings for potentially unacceptable content. When
a user attempts to
access such content or to access a site that has no ratings configured, IE7+
might block access
depending on the Content Advisor settings. In this case a responsible person
can allow access
by supplying a supervisor password. You can also configure Content Advisor
to permit access
to sites that have no content ratings configured. Unlike Parental Controls,
Content Advisor
addresses only browsing the Internet and does not address broader parental
concerns, such as
time logged on, access to certain applications, and so on. It also works on
a per-machine basis,
not a per-user basis.
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