Tasha and Noelle both recently got new computers. Both computers came with Vista Home Premium pre-installed. I havent installed Vista on my home machine yet, mostly due to the bad reviews it has received and the fact that work (MU) has decided to postpone upgrading to Vista until Fall of ‘08. After spending a week working with Vista, I would be ok with postponing it until ‘09. Maybe they’ll have all the kinks ironed out.
First, Vista comes with a set of Parental Controls built-in. I thought to myself “Great! Noelle and I have been talking about setting up some parental controls on Tasha’s computer anyway!” Also, as the sole IT person in the house, I have to support all the computers, so anything that will restrict someone from “breaking” the computer is ok in my book.
To set up Parental Controls, you have to create a Standard User Account for each child that will be using the computer. The account must be a standard account, not an admin account. Makes sense. Next, you have to log into an admin account, turn on parental controls and then specify HOW you want the child’s account restricted. I enabled the web filtering setting with the thought that it would help block access to potentially malicious websites. I’m not really worried about Tasha going to “inappropriate” sites so much as I am worried about a site from a google return launching a pop-up that goes to a malicious site. So I’m not really trying to restrict where she can go so much as I am trying to restrict where the “bad” guys can trick her into going.
OMG… what a train wreck. There are 4 options for web filtering: High, Medium, Off and Custom. Uh, where is Low? I started with Medium since the description said
Medium. With this level, websites are filtered based on web content categories. This lets your child explore the wide range of information on the Internet, but not see content that is inappropriate.
Sounds ok. I quickly found out (through Tasha yelling that her computer was broken) that she could barely navigate ANYWHERE on the net. She wanted some MCR photos to use as a background, but the parental controls had blocked her access to google images. So I changed the setting to Custom, and had it filter for mature content, pornography, and gambling. (You can see a complete list of categories here.) I also manually added google images to the white list. Crisis adverted… or so I thought.
As I worked on her machine some more, logged in under her account, I found myself constantly looking at the notice that the site I was attempting to go to was being blocked by the parental controls. What were the sites I was trying to go to? http://support.ea.com, http://www.nvidia.com, and http://www.codecguide.com. How do any of those sites have anything to do with porn, gambling, or mature content???? Granted, Tasha will probably never have a reason to go to nvidia or codecguide, but she could certainly find herself going to ea.com’s support site.
As it stands now, Vista built-in web filtering is an utter failure. All it will accomplish is a bunch of trips into her room to grant access to sites that she’ll need to get to while doing research for her homework. No thanks. I’ll go with a third party app that actually works.
Another section of the Parental Controls is the ability to control when an account can use the computer. Tasha, like her mother, isnt very good with time, and can easily lose track of how late it is. So I set up “blocked” times for when I know she wont be using the computer. However, I hadnt considered holidays. Like Memorial Day. So at 11pm Sunday night, Tasha was in our room asking why she couldnt use her computer. I quickly discovered that there is no way to temporarily override the block. I had to go into the main account, and change the blockage for that day of the week. That also means that at some point, I need to go and set it back to what it NORMALLY should be. Again, this seems like a half-baked applet, and you are better off with a third-party app that actually works.
The parental controls also includes the option to block games based on ratings. I didnt set up this particular setting. But stay with me here… You have to create a standard user account in order to use the parental controls, and there is even a games setting in the parental controls. Yet, there is no way (that I have found so far) in order to run any of her games without giving the admin account password. Yep, so far, all of her games (Sims 2, Rollercoaster Tycoon, Zoo Tycoon) need to run as an administrator. The only way they will run is to set the compatibility tab to “always run as admin”, but then doing so requires an admin password.
So, microsoft obviously knows there are a TON of games out there that are like this. They know that kids are going to be set up as standard user accounts. Why didnt they give us parents anyway of embedding the password into the compatibilty properties for a game??? Or some way of setting up that program to bypass the UAC controls? Or SOMETHING that would allow parents to *easily* set up the computer so that the child can be a SU account and run their games? I am quite sure that Microsoft will say that it is the responsibility of the game manufacturers to come up with patches, but sheez. I really doubt Atari is going to spend the money to write a patch for a game they now sell for $15. And its not like the game cant run in Vista… It CAN. It just cant run unless it runs as an admin.
This whole mess with the games makes me wonder how many of our non-microsoft applications are going to act the same way here at work. Are we going to have to give everyone either the admin password for their computer, or set them up with both a SU and an Admin account, invariably to have 95% of them always use the admin account because it is easier? And how are we going to explain to an upper-level manager that s/he really does need to enter in a password every time they want to run a particular app? Yea, that’ll go over real well.
Dont get me wrong; I COMPLETELY understand what Microsoft is trying to do with the UAC. And for the most part, I agree with it. But, like the Parental Controls, it seems to be a half-baked solution. In both an enterprise setting, and at home, you dont want your users running as admins, nor do you want them to have access to an admin account. There’s a reason you dont want your users to be able to install whatever software they please. 
But at the same time, they need to be able to run the applications to do their jobs (or homework, or play games at home) without requiring an IT person to come in and launch the app for them.
Ok, enough with the UAC problems. I also discovered that installing hardware as an admin doesnt necessarily make that hardware available to SU accounts. For example, I installed a netgear WG111T wireless usb nic, logged in as the administrator. After making sure it was working properly, and that I could access the network, I logged out of the admin account and logged into tasha’s account. I discovered that while Vista saw the hardware (it was listed in the device manager), vista was stating that it was unable to initialize the hardware. I had to unplug it, plug it back in, go through the driver installation again (since I had already installed it, shouldnt the drivers been cached into System32\drivers\ ???), and then go through all of the wireless settings… AGAIN. sheez!
At this point, I am REALLY close to wiping the drive and installing XP on there. Yes, I know I can turn off UAC, or simply change her account type to admin, but whats the point of Vista then? UAC and Parental Controls are supposed to be part of its selling points. The other “cool” stuff about vista can either be downloaded for free from Microsoft for XP, or can be aquired from third-party software vendors. At least with XP, there is decent hardware and software support, so I wont have to be hunting down beta Vista drivers. I’ll stick with Vista for a little bit longer, but another day like yesterday and that’ll be the straw…