Reply #17: Just reading the responses here so far [View All]

[Occulus]

We've come up with a number of angles on why this might not work so well, and all of them seem to be good, sound reasons, from fleecing the customers to overseas sites not covered by our legislation to regulation and enforcement. We've even seen a comparison between the TV nanny and the computer nanny.

Nice job, people. I think the recommendations from another poster here were correct: put the computer in a common area. No use without adult supervision.

Did you know?

Most PCs I've ever worked with (almost all of them, but for some very old ones) have a feature called a BIOS password. BIOS stands for Basic Input/Output System and is an actual "program" running in the background as soon as the PC boots. This is what shows the text-only screens you may see when you power up your PC after shutting it off; some boilerplate PC manufacturers (Dell, HP, etc) splash a logo there instead.

Modern BIOS's often have a system boot password that one must type in to get to any operating system. To clear the password, one must (usually) physically open the computer's case itself and connect a jumper on the motherboard. You'll have to refer to your computer's printed documentation or call customer support to find out how to set up a BIOS password, but once you do, so long as you don't tell your kids what it is, the only way they can get around it is to open the case and connect the jumpers- and if you don't have the little jumper connectors in plain sight, that's a little hard to do. :)

I always tell people with kids and a computer to set up a BIOS password. There's no "software" to disable and it's real obvious when anyone clears it.