users children’s computer access. The parent, with administrative rights, can limit the time, content, or programs that their child can use on the family computer. While it is not meant to be a replacement of proper parenting, a little bit of prevention isn’t such a bad thing to most.
Parental Controls are available and configured within the Windows Control Panel. Upon the Control Panel and look for the User Accounts and Family Safety section.
Locate and select the user you wish to configure from the displayed list of accounts.
By default, all the user options are currently grayed out and disabled – so first click ON the Parental Controls option in the upper left corner of the dialog.
Once enabled, you can now control the time the user is able to use the computer, as well as what games and applications are available. Specifically, lets focus on the time constraints under Time Limits.
Now click and drag out chunks of time through the day that you wish to allow the user access to the computer. The process is quite granual – you can restriction access on an hour by hour basis that is unique to even given day of the week. Here we’ve allowed the user access from 4-6pm Monday-Friday and all day on Saturday and Sunday.
Returning to the Parental Controls window you will now see that Time Limits are now in the On state for the user.
I set a time limit on my son in our Win 7 professional 64 bit operating system to prevent late night computer use.
He was working on an assignment and the computer timed out before saving his work.
I attempted to unlock the user to no avail – even going to the local users and groups where the account lockout is grayed out. Apparently the parental controls “timeoout” isn’t considered “locked out”
Why am I as an administrator not simply able to unlock the account with my user or password? We had to wait for the morning to access the time restricted account. Am I missing something or did a program designer take a coffee break in the middle of designing this feature?