Protect your child on the computer

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We have all heard about the dangers of allowing your child online without supervision but what stops can you put in place to help prevent these horror stories.   Here are a few tip on how to do this.

1. Make sure you make a separate account in windows that is either a standard user or limited user, this stops them changing any setting you make or even installing any programs you don’t know about.  To see how to do this click on the appropriate link.  XP, Vista and Windows 7

2. Never give then the password to the administrator account, again this would enable them to undo your settings.

3. Tell them never to give out any details, like address, phone number, email address, online usernames and passwords

4. If they have a laptop or computer in their rooms and you also have one downstairs then heavily restrict the one in their rooms and make then use the one you can see them use for social sites like facebook, myspace, bebo and twitter.

5. Talk to them about their online activity encase someone is bullying them online, let them know they can talk to you if they want to.

6. Use parental control.  Windows vista and 7 came with useful controls that let you limit what hours someone could log in as well, blocking certain websites and programs.  The other option you have is to get an activity report so you know what they have been getting up to.  Vista controls, Windows 7 controls.  You can see windows 7 parental controls in action here remember to set limits for games as well.  As for XP it does not have any built in but later I will look at a program that will help you.

7. Set restrictions on windows media player.  If you want to prevent R rated movies being played on the family computer then you can block films above a certain age rating being played. To do this go to 'Tools' then 'Options' then select the 'DVD' tab. Select the 'Change' button under DVD playback restrictions. Select the highest rating you want to be played and select OK

8. Set restrictions on Internet Explorer, this will block any content you think is too old for them

10. Don’t use your ISP’s DNS server, DNS explained (quite techie), one is OpenDNS.  OpenDNS has a free service that can block harmful website that have phishing or botnet sites. Other include DNSadvantage, openNIC, Scrubit and Google

11. If you have XP and don’t have the parental controls you can get software that will help, while they can not stop someone logging in when you don’t want them to you can however stop them accessing the internet.  One of the biggest and best know is Net Nanny, Bitdefender has it as part of it’s total security, which also has antivirus and firewall included.  For a list of other software click here

    This may seem like a lot of hard work but in most cases once it is set up you don’t need to go over it again unless circumstances change.  By following these tip, even if it only a few, then hopefully your child will have a good experience on the computer and the internet.

    Here are some extra links you might find handy

    Super nanny on video games
    Click Clever Click Safe: The first UK Child Internet Safety Strategy

Keeping your files up to date while on the move

I was taking to a local business who needed files while on the road but didn't want the hassle of moving files from his laptop to his desktop all the time just to keep them up to date and this got me thinking of solutions. Here are a few I have tried, I know there are more out there and if you use any or know of any then please add them.

First one I am going to talk about is Gladinet cloud desktop.

This allows you add a virtual hard drive to your computer where you can drag and drop your file like a normal drive but all your files are then moved into the cloud. This means you can access your files from different computers anywhere. Gladinet supports connections to many popular online storage systems including, Google docs, Picassa, Amazon S3, FTP and skydrive from Microsoft.

I have set up Gladinet with my skydrive account and this gives me a virtual drive of 25Gb. I have used this to backup my photo's of my family. As I was moving a lot of files I got the option to schedule my upload to a time that would not affect me, so I got it to start at midnight. If you have used skydrive you will know it is a pain as you cannot drag and drop folders onto it. At the moment there are 2 versions of Gladinet, the first is free but is limited to 1000 tasks/sub-tasks, the second one costs $60 and this limit is removed. They are working on a third level that has more integration.

The only disadvantage is that you need a internet connection to access your files. while this might work well with some people, it could be a problem for others.

My other suggestion is Dropbox solves this problem as it has an offline cached mode. As I only use Windows most of my suggestions are biased towards this but Dropbox is a universal program. You can get it for Windows, Linux, Macs and even a free app for your Iphone. This makes it easy to move files or share files between different formats and if this was not enough then you can also access your files using a browser.

Dropbox creates a folder in your My Documents folder, in windows, and it acts like a normal folder but it does take it's time to upload your files. Unlike Gladinet it does not offer a scheduled upload but instead does it straight away. Like I said Dropbox has an offline mode so as long as it has synced after you added files then you can use and save to your files on your other computer, when it does get a connection it does not upload all your files only the data that has changed so once you have it up it is quicker and uses less internet bandwidth. Unlike Gladinet who uses other online storage Dropbox uses theirs, as a result you only get 2Gb free but you can upgrade your storage to 50Gb or 100Gb at a cost but see website for details. Again this can be used as a method of backing up files that you need or want to share.

Please read their terms and conditions before you use them.

If you know anymore then please add them