Windows 7: Seeking advice on setting up laptop for daughters use

G'day,

My 8yr old daughter delivered on her promise of getting a good school report this year, and I'm delivering on mine by setting up a laptop for her.


At the moment, I've:

• Burn't the recovery disks
• Uninstalled the bloatware
• Setup some antimalware protection and software firewall
• Downloaded the updates and installed SP1
• Setup a standard user account for her
• Setup updating and scanning schedules
• Created a Macrium Image of unbloated system

We've already had a good talk about a good PC-life balance, and the fact that the laptop is only ever used in the family room. The ground rules have been discussed, and no quarter will be given. Rules are inviolate and assurances have been given under pain of with-holding of laptop privleges.

I plan on using Brink's excellent tutorial:

Parental Controls - Setup and Use

to lock-down/prevent access to most programs. I also plan to use this:

Windows Live Family Safety 2011

to setup some safeguards.

The usage, at least initially, will be for some educational gaming - absolutely no social programmes will be run. Longer term into 2012, I would like to teach her how lucky she is to have so much information at her disposal, simply through searching the internet, and to teach her to use this wonderful resource wisely. Herein lies my concern : whilst Windows Live Safety has a SafeSearch function, I've never used it so don't know how effective it is.

Has anyone in a similar position used this function, and if so, how effective is it? Is there an alternative "search engine" in existence that is more geared towards younger children?

I'd be particularly grateful to hear from those with children of similar age who have had to go on this journey. What are your suggestions/advice?

System Specifications:
eMachines Laptop
Pentium P6100 @2GHz
2 x 1GB DDR3 RAM
500GB HDD
Intel HD Graphics
Windows 7 Home Premium x64 SP1

Regards,
Golden

I have tried Kidzui (a browers with whitelist only pages) i believe whitelist only filtering is more effective that blacklist only filtering. But there's not much in the way of education, it seems much more play orientated.

Kidzui is an excellent start!!! Definately what I had in mind.....

Kepp them coming people...

Regards,
Golden

What a great Dad!

Remember to check system files after Cleaning up factory bloatware as they are frequently corrupted.

In particular I'd want a Clean Boot with the parental controls running in background - only them and AV.

Thnaks for the advice Greg - will definately check out the link.

Another good program for safesearch and filtering is k9... its not a browser or a search engine, but it modifies existing engines to specs that you can choose. Other than that you look pretty good!

-slizz

You may find this Microsoft article useful.

Web Security: Tips to Protect Kids Online | Microsoft Protect

@Slizz - that looks like really good, I'll check it out further, thanks a lot.

K9 Web Protection - Free Internet Filter and Parental Control Software | Free Internet Filtering and Parental Controls Software

@Seavixen - cheers mate.

You're very welcome Golden.

Children's safety online should be paramount so anything we can do to facilitate that is to be commended.

K9 is an excellent program I used for my grandsons netbook. After registering on K9 you can recieve emails of where your child has been on line or, tyring to access questionable sites.