Good parental control software?

My oldest child will soon be surfing the internet (she is 8 years old). She has already started asking about it, but we have only let her surf with us thus far.

We will soon be looking into parental control software. I am putting out some very initial feelers with this post. Ideally, I would like sonmething:

1. Free
2. Easy to use
3. Light on system resources

It doesn't need to be too complex just yet. She won't be doing any serious surfing for a number of years and probably won't be on-line without us over her shoulder for a while either. But you never know what a kid might do when your back is turned.

Any suggestions?

 

I'd like to know as well. My Granddaughter has been surfing for about 6 months on sites like Disney and cartoon network. She somehow got on U-Tube and while there got a porno pop up. I tried the IE7 site advisor, but it's a pain in the A.. to use.

 

I read some very good reviews about the Parental Control Software by Crawler. Crawler has a bad rep in this forum, and rightfully so as they used to be associated with adware. But I believe that they have cleaned up their act. At least it appears that they have.

I use their product Spyware Terminator and love it. But I have only been using it for a month or so. I read some reviews on-line about their Parental Control product and it got very good marks for being easy to use yet also doing a good job of blocking unwanted sites. To bootm it's free. I haven't tried it yet, but am going to. If you try it, I would like to see your feedback.


http://www.crawlerparental.com/

 

A review: http://www.consumersearch.com/www/software/parental-control-software/index.html
And Tech Support Alert: http://www.techsupportalert.com/more/extended.htm#78

 

When my kids were younger I always used Cyber Patrol. Just one of the programs I trusted, not to mention it made me feel like the Police Chief in this household, lol.

 

Does anyone else have any experience either good or bad on any free parental control software

I have been looking at these.
http://www.freeshield.com/
http://www.k9webprotection.com/
and
http://www.crawlerparental.com/

I am currently using a free 3 month trial of Mcafee security centre.
What i like about the parental controls with this is that i can configure different settings for different users.
The only downside being that i would have to pay once my trial expires next month ( which i wont be doing as funds are tight at the moment)

 

i agree Cyber Patrol all the way worth the money one day had about five high schoolers with my daughter trying to change the settings so they could get online , they try for a couple hours then give up they could not do it !!!

 

My own recommendation would be router level filtering since a Linux Live CD would allow surfing with impunity if the controls are based on software running on the PC.

Blue

 

I would certainly take K9webprotection, great free filter that's very hard to bypass.

 

I`ve tried this before (netgear DG834GT) but whenever i try to "Block Sites Containing these Keywords or Domain Names" then it stops me from accessing a lot of websites that i use regular, and no matter how i try to alter the words i can never seem to find a happy medium.
Unless of course i am doing it all wrong (there would be no suprise there) and there is another way, then its going to have to be the software way.
Maybe you have a list of keywords that you use that you could let me have or would a different router be advised.

Thanks for all of the replies to my question

 

Not keywords, a router based agent. Example: a ZyXel ZyWall 2 Plus with a Content Filtering subscription.

Blue

 

In my experience K9 is a very good one.

 

I`ve had a look through the knowledgebase for my router, and content filtering can only be applied via keywords.

Thanks for all the replies
It is looking like K9 is the favourite at the moment.

 

I have been using k9 for a couple of weeks now and i am very impressed with the program.

Thank you for everyones help and advice

I feel a lot happier now with AVS, Spyware Terminator, Boclean, Comodo firewall, spywareblaster and of course K9 protecting my computer.