To effectively set up Parental Controls for a child’s account in Windows Vista, you must first protect your administrator accounts with a password. Click the Start button and Control Panel. Under User Accounts and Family Safety, click Add or remove user accounts.

Click the icon for each administrator account on your Windows Vista computer. Select Create a password. Type a strong password of with at least 8 characters which consists of both letters and numbers. Then type a hint that will help you remember your password if you forget it. Click Create password.

Click User Accounts and Family Safety in the address bar. If your child doesn’t already have an account on your Windows Vista computer, select Add or remove user accounts, then click Create a new account. Type a name for the child’s account. Select Standard account as the account type and click Create account.

Click Manage Accounts in the address bar and select Set up Parental Controls. Select your child’s account from the list.

Under Parental Controls, click On, enforce current settings. Under Activity Reporting, ensure that On, collect information about computer usage is checked.

Click Windows Vista Web Restrictions. In this screen, you can choose to block certain websites and content or to allow all websites and content. You may also click the Edit the allow and block list link to allow or block specific websites.

If you’re setting up the computer for a younger child or if your child has a tendency to visit inappropriate websites, check the box beside Only allow websites that are on the allow list.  Otherwise, choose a web restriction level for the Parental Controls under Block web content automatically.

The High web restriction level will block all websites except those which are specifically approved for children. The Medium web restriction level blocks unrateable web content and other content that is inappropriate for children, such as mature content. You may also choose to block web downloads by checking the next box. Click OK.

Click Time Limits, then click and drag your mouse over the hours when your child should not use the Windows Vista computer. The blocks in the graph should turn blue. Make sure to block all hours before 8 or 9 am and all hours after 8 or 9 pm.

If you prefer, you can choose to block your child’s access to the Windows Vista computer at other times, such as during breakfast, lunch or dinner or during times when you or another adult will need the computer.

If the child is on the computer when a blocked hour begins, he or she will be automatically logged off of the computer. When you’re satisfied with the Time Restrictions, click OK.

Click Games to set game restrictions. Game ratings only controls games which are installed on the computer, and cannot block or allow online games. Select Yes if you would like to allow the child to play games on your computer. If not, choose No.

If you’ve chosen Yes, click Set game ratings to choose which games the child can play. Choose whether you’d like to block or allow unrated games. Select Early Childhood for younger children. Select Everyone for children under 10 years of age. Choose Everyone 10+ for children between the ages of 10 and 13.

If you don’t mind your child being exposed to some strong language or violence, you may choose Teen for teenagers between the ages of 13 and 17. However, if these things concern you, you may select Everyone 10+ for your teenaged children instead. Click OK to enable your game ratings choice. Click Block or Allow for specific games.

If you’ve chosen to block unrated games, you may allow certain unrated games in this section. Also, if you’ve chosen Everyone 10+ or Teen as your game rating selection, you may block specific games which have violence, language and suggestive themes which you don’t want your child to observe.

The specific games which are currently installed on your computer will appear in this window. Go over each game individually, view its rating and select whether you want to block it, allow it or use the user rating setting you set in the Game Ratings parental controls.

If you’re uncertain whether a specific game is appropriate for children, consider playing it for a few minutes to determine whether you should block it or allow it. When you’re satisfied with your selections, click OK.

Click Allow and Block Specific Programs. If you want to allow your child to use all programs, select User can use all programs. If you want to block programs from running, select User can only use the programs I allow.

Wait for the computer to scan the Program Files folder, then select the allowed programs from the list. If a program is missing, click the Browse button to add it. When you’re finished, click OK.

You can get more information on this topic at How to block Internet web sites with free parental control software.

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Although your computer usually automatically creates a restore point every time you install new software, drivers or updates, there’s no guarantee that it will. It’s wise to create a manual restore point before you major changes to your computer’s settings, install software or manually edit the registry.

If turn System Protection off on a disk, all your restore points for that disk will be deleted. If System Restore fails to automatically create a restore point when you turn it back on, you should create a manual restore point. To use System Restore in Windows Vista, you must have about 300 MB of free space on your hard drive.

Your drive must be larger than 1 GB and must be formatted using the NTFS file system, as System Restore cannot protect FAT32 or FAT file systems. System restore restores important files and settings such as system files, installed programs and registry settings. It doesn’t change your personal user files, such as documents, email messages or pictures, stored on your computer.

Creating a System Restore Point on a Disk

Click the Start button, then right click Computer and select Properties. In the left pane, click System Protection.

Under Automatic restore points select the drive for which you’d like to create a restore point. Beside You can create a restore point right now for the disks selected above, click Create.

Type a description of the restore point in the field provided. You can use today’s date, or you can type a description of the changes you’re about to make to your computer. For example, describe the software you’re about to install or the edits you’re going to make to the registry. If it works, you will receive a message that the Restore point has been created successfully.

Restoring Your Manual Restore Point

Save your work and close all open programs. Click the Start Search box, type System Restore and press Enter. Click Next, then look in the window for your restore point. Your most recent restore point will appear.

Select it and click Next. Review the information under Confirm your restore point and click Finish. System Restore will now restart your computer to return it to the earlier state you chose.

For more information, read How to enable or disable System Restore in Vista.

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This data is located in \Windows\Prefetch, and, as the theory goes, periodically clearing out the data in this folder (say, once a month) will improve performance.  Prefetch files are files with a “PF” extension inside the Prefetch directory:

As new applications are subsequently started, new prefetch data will be created, which may mean slightly reduced performance at first. But with older entries gone, there will be less data to parse, and Windows should be able to locate the data it needs more quickly. Any performance gains you may see will be minor (if you see any at all), but those users wishing to squeeze every last CPU cycle out of their computers will want to try this one.

Note that deleting Prefetch data may increase boot time slightly, but only the next time you boot Windows. Each subsequent boot should proceed normally, since the prefetch data will already be present for the programs Windows loads when it boots.

The Prefetcher’s configuration is stored in the windows Registry at

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters.

The EnablePrefetcher value can set to be one of the following:

• 0 = Disabled
• 1 = Application launch prefetching enabled
• 2 = Boot prefetching enabled
• 3 = Applaunch and Boot enabled (Optimal and Default)

It is a known myth to change the default value to anything other than 3 to speed up performance. If you notice a performance issue caused by an “optimizer” software that changed this registry value to non-3, bring back the original value to 3.

Ben Carigtan shows you how it’s done!

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Here, you can choose each folder to include in the index; you can index an entire drive index only certain subfolders.  By default, only your personal files are indexed. But if you plan on hacking up Vista as described elsewhere in this book, you may want to index your entire drive.

This will make it easier to find .exe files in the Windows folder, for instance, but doing so will increase the size of the index, which may slow down the rest of your searches. For privacy purposes, you may wish to exclude certain folders by removing them on this list. You can further speed up searches by also excluding folders
you don’t need to search.

Click OK when you’ve selected folders to index, but you’re not done yet. Next, click the Advanced button to open the Advanced Options window. Most of the options shown here are fairly self-explanatory, but what may not be obvious is that Windows won’t index many file types unless you select them by hand in the File Types tab:

Choose only the file types that you want to be indexed to speed up searches.  Watch out for more Windows optimization tips!

Ben Carigtan shows you how it’s done!

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An interrupt request line, or IRQ, is a numbered hardware line over which a device can interrupt the normal flow of data to the processor, allowing the device to function.

Windows Vista and 7 lets you prioritize one or more IRQs (which translate to one or more hardware devices), potentially improving the performance of those devices.  Below are basic registry editing tips that you can use to set IRQ priorities.

1. Start by opening the System Information utility (msinfo32.exe), and navigating to System Summary\Hardware Resources\IRQs to view the IRQs in use on your system, and the devices using them.

Take note of IRQ13 (Numeric Data processor) that we will use in this example:

2. Next, open the Registry Editor and navigate to

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\PriorityControl

3. Create a new DWORD value in this key, and call it IRQ#Priority, where
# is the IRQ of the device you wish to prioritize (e.g., IRQ13Priority for
IRQ 13, which is your numeric processor).

4. Double-click the new value, and enter a number for its priority. Enter 1
for top priority, 2 for second, and so on. Make sure not to enter the same priority number for two entries, and keep it simple by experimenting with only one or two values at first.

5. Close the Registry Editor and reboot your computer when you’re done.

Some users have gotten good results prioritizing IRQ 8 (for the system
CMOS) and the IRQ corresponding to the video card but the feedback is unconfirmed: http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=486231

Do you think it is a placebo tweak? Post your comments!

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