Windows Parental Controls

By DustinPosted on

The Internet is full of great information, and anything is available from music to movies to books and everything in between. However, with all that great knowledge and entertainment there is also the bad and the ugly. For those with children in the house that also use the family computer, this could be a recipe for disaster. Thankfully, Microsoft has seen the dark side of the Internet and being a family oriented company, they have included a set of Parental Controls within Windows 7 (it is also available for Windows Vista).

There are a lot of options available to keep your family safe while online and offline. Parental Controls can limit what sites your child goes to with a whitelist and a blacklist, limit what games they can and cannot play, limit when they can use the computer and what programs they are allowed to run. There are a few initial steps to configure before you can set all the options, however.

First, you need to make sure your main Administrator account is password protected. This makes it so that your child cannot access your account and turn off Parental Controls. Next, you need to make sure you have another account made for the person that you are going to enable Parental Controls. This can all be done from the Parental Controls icon within the Control Panel.

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Now that the hard part is over, it is time to setup the actual Parental Controls, which is pretty self-explanatory. You can access the Parental Controls through the Control Panel.

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You set time limits for computer usage for any time day or night. This isn’t the best way to control access to the PC for the kids, but if you want to make sure they go to bed on time, get their homework done, or only like to allow them a certain amount of time online, this is a great place to set a limit on when they can use the PC. The one thing that you cannot do is limit the duration of time online. You can only limit the hours and days which they can or cannot use the PC.

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Most kids enjoy gaming on the PC, from the basic Solitare to the newest Crysis. But, some games are not appropriate for all ages. You can set limits on what games can be played based on the ESRB rating. This can keep the kids from downloading and playing a Mature rated game without your knowledge.

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You can also limit or block which games have certain content, rather than the rating. If you want to have any game other than those with drugs and alcohol, that option is available. There is a long list of items you can block. This will block the entire game from running under the Kids account, not block the actual content of the game itself. You can also block individual games from running that are already installed on your computer.

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The last feature of the Windows 7 Parental Controls is the ability to block individual applications. The best way to do this is to enable all and only disable the few that you do not want them to be able to access. Some are dependent on others, and some are easily overlooked that could interfere with legitimate usage.

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After all is said and done with Parental Controls, your kids will be limited as to what they can do. But, there are weaknesses in the built in controls. Microsoft has recognized this and added an Additional Controls which allows you to select other providers to compliment the built in settings. The one that is available from the start is the Windows Live Family Safety, part of Windows Live Essentials. This allows you to monitor more of their online activities including who they can chat with, what websites they can and cannot visit, and get reports on what sites they do visit.

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While no parental control program is completely secure and able to protect your family from everything, Parental Controls definitely takes a step in the right direction. Coupled with Windows Live Family Safety, you will have peace of mind of your childs safety while on the PC.

Resources:

Windows Live Family Safety 2011: http://explore.live.com/windows-live-family-safety

TuneUp Utilities 2011

By DustinPosted on

PC users are always looking for ways to speed up their systems, looking for that one magical setting to make everything run smooth, fast and stable. Unfortunately, there is no single magical setting. There are many factors that go into making your PC faster using your current hardware. Sure, you could spend hundreds of dollars to upgrade to the fastest, newest hardware, but we want to get the most for our money and our existing hardware. For that, there is a program called TuneUp Utilities. I will be reviewing their latest version, TuneUp Utilities 2011 today.

TuneUp Utilities packages multiple tools into one package, allowing you to get the most performance from your PC with very little work. Of course, that is the claim. I aim to see if this is in fact true, if there are any noticeable improvements in speed and usability. I have never owned or used an all-in-one maintenance tool for my PC, this will be my first experience with one.

Setup is very simple, very similar to other applications. Once the initial setup is complete, you are presented with a 1-Click Maintenance window. You can run an initial scan that cleans and defragments your registry (registry defragging is still considered snake oil by some), deletes temporary files, fixes broken shortcuts and defrag your hard drive.

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The main window of the program has five tabs to help you tune your PC for maximum performance, as well as scheduling routine maintenance.

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The Tuning status can help speed up your system using tweaks and registry changes. You go through a series of questions that help the program improve system and network speed. It also suggests which programs to remove if you haven’t used them in a selected period of time. There are programs on systems that you run once and are done, but they still sit there using system resources. The people at TuneUp have tested thousands of programs, installing and uninstalling to find out which ones use the most resources and how much performance you gain by uninstalling the program.

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The Program Deactivator can enable and disable certain programs that present a higher load on your system. You can disable the high load programs until they are needed to gain more speed.

Another great feature that I love about this program is the Live Optimization, which increases the priority of your running program to make it a bit faster. This does its work on the fly when your application needs more CPU resources.

The built in Turbo Mode shuts down certain processes to make your PC faster, which comes in handy when you are playing a game or other high processor use. It does things such as shut down automatic defrag, automatic updates, device detection, media sharing, and other resource hogs. Does this really speed things up? In theory, yes. I didn’t notice any FPS gain at all, but for those that could use the extra few percent increase in speed, it may be worth it.

So, does TuneUp Utilities really make your system faster? In short: yes. It frees up RAM by disabling programs that you don’t use, clears your temporary files, defrags your hard drive, and fixes errors that cause problems. Yes, you could do this by yourself, but it would take many hours to get everything the way that TuneUp does it, using quite a few separate programs.

TuneUp Utilities does this all automatically, in the background after the initial setup. I take care of my system using several different tools, which are supposed to do the same thing that TuneUp does, but there were still quite a few issues that TuneUp was able to diagnose and fix. There are many settings to tune your performance using the program, and it can take quite a while to manually do everything to your liking. The good part is that the automatic optimization works very well.

Yes, TuneUp Utilities costs around $50USD, but the money is well spent. The amount of time that is saves is well worth the money (time is money, they say!). There are a lot of places that try to sell you programs that do the same thing, but with a lot less features, commercials on television that promise to make your PC faster, but TuneUp Utilities delivers on that promise. My first thought of this program, like the others, was that it was a lot of snake oil, that makes you think your PC is faster, but nothing really improves. I was proven wrong this time. There are many ways to make your PC faster, and upgrading hardware is usually #1, but to get the most of your current hardware, I recommend a software product like TuneUp Utilities.

Microsoft & FBI Take Down BotNet

By DustinPosted on

A Microsoft team in cooperation with the US Federal agents have taken down a major botnet, which was one of the largest out there: Rustock. Spam stopped from the botnet for quite a while, but it is probably only temporary.

The raiders brought a copy of the federal order allowing Microsoft to seize computers thought to have been taken over by the spam network, and that were relaying instructions to a million or more computers in the U.S. and elsewhere. Hard drives and computers were seized in the raids at the hosting providers. Much of the equipment had been leased by companies in other countries, according to Microsoft.

Windows 8 Beta This Spring

By DustinPosted on

In a roundabout way, and just assuming here, Spring might be the time when Windows 8 is formally announced and a beta is unleashed. In an interview with Softpedia, Mr. Ondřej Vlček – Avast CTO, said that he has something scheduled with Microsoft this Spring. Let’s home Microsoft can get the OS into developers hands well before the launch so we don’t have another Vista moment with dev’s not having enough time to fix their applications… Or so they said.

Softpedia: Have you had any contact with Microsoft regarding Windows 8? Have you seen any technology preview?
Ondřej Vlček: Not yet. We have something scheduled for this spring. Hopefully we will get our hands on an early build and find out what changes break things, so we can modify the code to be ready when the product ships.

Save IE6 Petition

By DustinPosted on

What started as an April fools joke is still going. Internet Explorer 6 is an old, insecure internet browser. I am sure some thought this to be serious, but even Microsoft can’t joke about this thing.

These days we are inundated with bloated web browsers that overcomplicate our lives. However, there is one eminent exception: IE6. It has been around since 2001 and is still one of the most powerful and versatile browsers available.

This is why we want to achieve the following:

  • Get everyone to use IE6
  • Get IE6 ported to more platforms
  • Get the W3C standard changed to fit IE6

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Kinect in Guinness Book For Sales

By DustinPosted on

The Guinness Book of World Records, a series my 10 year old really enjoys, has crowned the Kinect the fastest selling consumer gadget of all time. My family has recently purchased a Kinect and we really like it. Skynet Jr. as I like to call it.

As if selling over 8 million Kinects in its first 60 days wasn’t already impressive enough, Microsoft’s camera motion sensor for the Xbox 360 is now officially the "fastest-selling consumer device" in history, according to Guinness World Records. It’s even hotter than the iPad when it claimed the fastest-selling gadget record back in October.

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New App Lets IE6 Apps Run on IE8/9

By DustinPosted on

A new application is being developed, called UniBrows, that allows users to run applications designed for Internet Explorer 6 while using a newer version of the browser. Using IE6 for the sake of an old application is a huge security risk, among other reasons. I wonder how many of these businesses still run DOS applications because making Windows applications cost more to develop.

Microsoft has not been helpful by telling users to rewrite IE6 apps as it did in this letter to customers: “Update and remediate your applications to IE8 as soon as possible." While this remediation process can take time and effort, it is the preferred and best solution.” One Browsium customer told Schare that rewriting just one IE6-configured app to run in IE8 could cost his company $5 million. In a typical enterprise running thousands of apps, there may be only 10 or 20 that run only in IE6, but 10 or 20 times $5 million is an expense that can be hard to justify. And besides, in some situations, the developer who wrote the original app for IE6 may no longer be with the company.

Error 0xC0000034 During SP1 Install

By DustinPosted on

There are some people that are having issues with the latest Service Pack for Windows 7 and Server 2008R2. You may get the error: !! 0xc0000034 !! 142/53007 (_0000000000000000.cdf-ms), even upon a restart. Microsoft has come up with a fix to uninstall the Service Pack:

Option 1 (Win7 client only):  Use a system restore point to recover the system

  • This one is pretty self explanatory.  Boot your machine into WinRE and pick a restore point before the service pack was installed.  This should get you back up and running. 
  • This doesn’t work on server

Option 2 (Win7 client and 2008 R2 server):  Delete the poqexec entry

  • Boot into WinRE and choose a command prompt then run the following commands and restart the computer:
    • Reg load HKLMBaseSystem C:WindowsSystem32configSYSTEM
    • Reg Delete "HKLMBaseSystemCurrentControlSetControlSession Manager" /v SetupExecute
    • Reg add "HKLMBaseSystemCurrentControlSetControlSession Manager" /v SetupExecute /t REG_MULTI_SZ
    • Reg unload HKLMBaseSystem
  • If you’re more graphically inclined, you can use this method:
    • Boot into WinRE
    • Open Registry Editor using regedit.exe 
    • Now you will have the WinRE registry loaded so you need to load the “ System ” hive
    • To do that : Highlight HKLM then  Click on File > Load Hive > Browse to C:windowssystem32config (assuming C: being the system drive )
    • Name the Hive as TEST 
    • Browse to HKLMTESTselect and check the value for “ Current “
    • Assuming the value as (1) browse to HKLMTESTControlSet001ControlSessionManager
    • Locate and double click the key “SetupExecute ” at the right panel 
    • Delete any value inside the key and click OK
    • Highlight TEST and then Click on File > Unload hive
    • Type exit at cmd
    • Reboot the machine and choose to start the machine normally

KinEmote To Connect Kinect to PC

By DustinPosted on

KinEmote is software to use the Kinect on your PC. I’m sure with more software taking advantage of the Kinect, it’s only a matter of time before it hits critical mass and there are MANY games and applications designed especially for the PC and Kinect.

Angry Birds using KinEmote

 

 

Features new in version 0.4 beta
– Virtual Mouse mode with push-to-click action.
– Enhanced visual notifications in Boxee and XBMC.
– Choice of ‘push’ or ‘wrist wave’ to initiate hand tracking sessions.
– Audio notifications for session start, front plane, back plane and session end.
– Enhanced video feedback panel.
– HUD style indicators on video feedback that react to menu navigation and plane selection.
– Camera LED notifications – off when inactive, green for front plane, red for back plane.
– Xbox Kinect motor control to adjust the angle of your camera.
– Completely revised settings menus for simple intuitive configuration.
– Updated main user interface.