When you are using your computer for work in office or you are setting it up for your kids, then you may want to restrict the Internet access only to a few appropriate websites and block the rest of them. This way your office employees or kids would be able to access one or two websites and nothing else. It can be done very easily in Windows through the Parental Controls feature in Windows Vista, 7 and 8. Here is how:
Note: You must be an administrator in Windows to follow these instructions. These instructions are for Windows 8, but they are similar in Windows Vista and 7.
- Press Win + R key combination to open the Run dialog. In the Run dialog, type control /name Microsoft.ParentalControls and press Enter. This would open the Parental Controls section in the Control Panel.
- You would be able to see a list all the user accounts. Select one of the accounts for which you want to set the restrictions. On Windows Vista and 7, if the Web Filter option does not appear for that user, then you may have to install Windows Live Essentials on your PC before proceeding. In the following example we are going to select the user named Robert.
- Select On, enforce current settings to enable Parental Controls for that user. Then click on the Web filtering to open the web filter settings for that user.
- Choose User can only use the websites I allow and then click on Allow or block specific websites as shown in the following screenshot:
- In the window that opens, you can add allowed websites to a list. To add a website to the allowed list, type its domain name and then click on the Allow button. There is no need to add any sites to the block list.
- That’s it. After this the target user (Robert in our case), would be able to access only the allowed sites (the ones you added to the allowed list in the step 5 above). All other sites will be blocked automatically. This restriction works for all web browsers and other applications.
