How to Set up Parental Control in Windows 8?

If you are worried about your kid's online safety, a great way is to set up parental controls. In Windows 7, you can use its built-in parental controls to manage how your child uses the computer. You can set limits on the hours that your children can use the computer, the games they can play and the programs they can run. And it when it comes to the upcoming Windows 8, you can do more.

What can you do in Windows 8 to keep your kids online?

Windows 8 comes with significantly improved Family Safety features to help you monitor your children's computer usage, get weekly reports, set time limits for computer use, filter inappropriate websites, block children from using certain applications, and more. Following is a more detailed explanation from Building Windows 8 blog.

• Web Filtering: You can choose between several web filtering levels.
• SafeSearch: When web filtering is active, SafeSearch is locked into the "Strict" setting for popular search engines such as Bing, Google, and Yahoo. This will filter out adult text, images, and videos from your search results.
• Time Limits: With Windows 8, you now can restrict the number of hours per day your child can use their PC. For example, you might set a limit of one hour on school nights and two hours on weekends. This is in addition to the bedtime limits currently available in Windows 7.
• Windows Store: Activity reports list the most recent Windows Store downloads, and you can set a game-rating level, which prevents your children from seeing apps in the Windows Store above a particular age rating.
• Application and Game Restrictions: As in Windows 7, you can block specific applications and games or set an appropriate game rating level.

In short, you can monitor what your kids are doing in Windows 8, no matter where they use their PC. And to do this, all you have to do is create a Windows user account for each child.

How to create a children's account?

Creating a children's account in Windows 8 is very simple. You only need to check the box to turn on Family Safety in the last step of creating a new local account or Microsoft Account in Windows 8, and get the weekly reports that describe your children's PC use. No additional downloads, installation wizards, or configuration steps are required.

As soon as the children's account is enabled, you'll receive a welcome email followed by weekly email reports summarizing your child's computer activities. You can click the links in the weekly report to add more restrictions.

It's highly recommended that parents log in as the computer administrator and make sure children have separate standard accounts. In addition, please add a strong password to the child account for security reasons. Meanwhile, don't forget to create a Windows 8 password reset disk in case that you forgot Windows 8 password in future though there will come out a lot of Windows password recovery tool.

• How to Create and Use Windows 7 Password Reset Disk?
• Reset Windows 7 Password with CD/DVD or USB Flash Drive
• What if You Forgot Windows 7 Password?