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>> You know it's been a long time since I was five years old. But kids as young as five are using computers and going on the Internet these days. That's a good thing in general. Unless they go to the wrong sites or use the wrong program. I'm Brian Cooley. Today on this Insider's Secret, I'll show you how to keep that from happening. How to set up Windows Vista so your kids have their own account that keeps them doing the right stuff and going to the right sites.
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Now the first step to giving your kid permissions on the machine is to give your kid an account on the machine. That's the only way you can do it. So let's make an account of our children. Go to the new fangled start button, head over to control panel. And then you're going to find this user accounts and family safety tab. Boy that sounds squeaky clean doesn't it? Now add or remove user accounts and click through to that until you get to the screen where the accounts are listed. Down here is a little text link create a new account. Let's do that. And you've got to give the account a name. So put your kid's name in there. Make sure it says standard user, which is what we want. And hit create account. Okay, the account is created, now we want to add some controls to it. Here's where the rubber hits the road. Click on the account you just made for the kid and now go to set up parental controls. All pretty self explanatory so far. First of all, under parental controls, turn those on. Otherwise, we're going nowhere. And that will enforce a variety of settings we're about to fiddle with. Next thing I want to do is leave activity reporting switched on. That should be the default. We'll get to that later. Now let's drop down to the web filter. Windows Vista web filter. Click on that. The next one is an allow or block list. I like this one, especially for younger kids. If you check that, now you can add and ban sites they can go to. Just click on the edit and allow block list link. And now you type in a website let's say that you want them to go to. Here's one that I would encourage. Type in the address and hit allow. Let's say there's a site you don't want them to go to. Type in that web address and hit block. Now you've also got a box down here called block file download. Those can often be malicious, so you might want to check that one as well. Let me show you the next one here. We have time limits. Not only can you block what your kid does, you can block when they do it. This gives you a calendar of the days, times of the hours, and it's really easy to use. Just take your mouse and drag out the hours and days you want them to use. That's pretty self explanatory. The next one I want to show you is games. You can decide which games they get to use several ways. First of all, do you want to let them play games at all, yes, or no. The next one is do you want to have them play games of certain ratings. So you can have them only play games that are rated for their age group and no games that are mature or really violent or really adult. And those are using the standard game ratings you see on the box of the games you buy. And then you've also got the specific game list, kind of like the specific website list. That's how that one works. There's one just like it for programs. Now once you're done with those four major areas of content and access restriction, here is the way to make sure it's all working. Over here on the right side, view activity reports. Remember back in the early part of this we let the activity reporting switch stay on. Now that means that that information is being collected and it goes into this report. So whenever you want, you can click that and get a report looking back at where your kid has been, the files they've downloaded, the other activities they've done in terms of running applications etcetera. It's a very nice way to make sure things are working and to keep them honest as well. I'm Brian Cooley. Thanks for joining me for this Insider Secret.
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