Today children grow up surrounded by computers, tablets, smartphones and they spend a lot of time online. They use these devices to communicate with friends, play video games, or get the information they need from the internet.
And it’s usually their parents’ job to monitor what their kids can see online, who they meet or what they share. And with the development of online devices getting more and more challenging every year.
Microsoft to the rescue
But parents are not left to do their own monitoring. Most of the top operating system manufacturers include in their products some tools for parental control (window parental controls). Today we will see, what Microsoft’s flagship Windows 8 OS has to offer. The previous operating systems Vista and Windows 7 already had a fairly high level of security, but in Windows 8 the standard was raised even higher.
Watch first
Previous parental control systems were mainly focused on filtering options or blocking certain websites. In Windows 8, Microsoft changed course, and the main essence of parental control comes from the “monitor first” approach. Through this feature all web activity, which can tell you which websites your child is viewing or trying. This includes websites deemed inappropriate or suspicious. The next thing is the ability to monitor all computer activity, and this can tell us which apps or games were used on the child’s account and for how long. It can also display information if our child is blocked from using certain applications.
What’s new?
Parental control in Windows 8 has all the same limitations that were present in previous versions of this OS, but there are some new additions. The first thing to note, is that the control settings are very easy. When you add a new user in Windows 8, there is a checkbox that asks if this is a child account and allows us to enable Family Safety mode which will provide us with weekly reports on their PC usage. Another feature of the time limit branch is called „curfew”, and it allows us to limit how many hours of the day an account can be used.
It is fully integrated with the Windows Store, which allows us to limit what our kids can view and download from there. In addition, you can block certain games or applications or only set the appropriate game rating level due to PEGI, which will be available to play. One of the most interesting things is the SafeSearch web filter, which filters out adult videos, images or text from the most popular search engines, such as Google, Yahoo or Bing.
Summary
In short, the parental controls in Windows 8 are very user-friendly and contain useful tools, which can be used to fine-tune all the restrictions you might think of. But it’s always good to secure yourself with some additional third-party software, which may have some unique features not present in Microsoft products. If you want to know more, visit pcwebcontrol.com.
PCWebControl widely used parental monitoring software. It contains many attractive features, which will let you worry less about your child’s online activities.
