If you’re a parent, grandparent, guardian, or concerned relative or friend, a child’s access to a computer is a huge source of worry. Fortunately, you can restrict the type of content the child can access, and, if several children have access to your computer, you can make custom settings that are age-appropriate for each child’s account.
If any of the individuals whose Web content you want to restrict are logged on, ask them to log off, or log them off yourself.
Click the Start button, choose Control Panel from the Start menu, and, in the User Accounts And Family Safety section, click Set Up Parental Controls For Any User. In the Parental Controls window that appears, click the account to which you want to apply the controls. If the individual doesn’t have an account, click Create A New User Account, create a Standard account for that person, and click Create Account.
In the User Controls window, select the On, Enforce Current Settings option to turn on the parental controls if they aren’t already turned on.
Specify whether you want Windows Vista to keep a record of Web sites visited, games played, programs run, and so on.
Click Windows Vista Web Filter to display the Web Restrictions window.
- In the Web Restrictions window, select this option to enable specifying what content should be blocked.
- If there are specific Web sites that you want to allow when they’re normally blocked, or that you want to block when they’re normally allowed, click this option, and add the relevant Web addresses to the Allowed Websites or Blocked Websites list in the Allow Blocked Webpages window. Click OK when you’ve finished.
- If you clicked the Custom option, select the check boxes for the type of content you want to block.
- Select this check box if you don’t want to allow files to be downloaded from the Web.
See Also
"Restricting Access on the Computer" for information about setting the other parental controls.
Tip
You can create a custom list of allowed and blocked Web sites and then use the list to set the controls for each individual on any computer that’s running Windows Vista. To do so, in the Allow Blocked Webpages window where you created your list, click Export, and save the file. When you’re setting up any additional parental controls, click Import in the Allow Blocked Webpages window, and import the custom-list file you previously saved.