Crawler Parental Control -- Free Windows Parental Control Software

Many parents want some way to control their children's computer use: to help prevent them from accidentally (or purposely) accessing inappropriate sites, to prevent them from using the computer to play games when they should be using it to do their homework, etc. Most parental control software is not cheap, sometimes even requiring regular fees to keep it up to date and blocking the newest obviously inappropriate sites. Crawler Parental Control is freeware from the people who make Spyware Terminator.

Like most parent control programs, Crawler Parental Control has its odd quirks and occasional "why did they make this so hard" configuration methods, but overall seems a solid and powerful parental control program for Windows. CPC allows a parent to:

* Control the websites your children can browse
* Limit what installed software your children can run
* Limit or prevent the installation of new software
* Limit which folders your children can access
* Limit what times (and for how long) your children can access the Internet or use a particular program
* Hide content on your computer that you do not want your children to see
* Get detailed reports of what your children are doing on the computer. You can even access these records from another computer.

Like all parental control programs, Crawler Parental Control is not perfect. Some sites with content you consider inappropriate will not be blocked (and some sites you don't want blocked might be blocked). Computer savvy teens may be able to figure out how to bypass the program completely. Etc. However, Crawler Parental Control seems to do as good a job as any of the expensive parental control programs I've seen -- and it does it for a great price: free.

Operating System: Windows 2000, XP
Price: Free
Web Site: http://www.crawlerparental.com/

Tags: windows, freeware, parental control software, Crawler Parental Control