One of my co-workers gave me a pretty hard time when I bought computers for my kids. What prompted this was that even though I had their login on my wife’s machine locked down and had employed a significant anti-virus and anti-spyware protection to the machine. Little kids and mouse clicking go hand in hand.
I had visited the majority of the sites that they liked to visit and deemed them kid safe and had configured those sites for ready access. They had a half dozen more for me to look at last time and I went thru them rather quickly before giving the ok to them.
Well these damn kid sites are chocked full of spyware and they lure the kids in by presenting them a popup window and bing kids hit ok and they have effectively gaven permission to be spied on.
I found that no matter how hard I tried withing a couple of weeks I was deleting there user account and spending some time cleaning the machine up. Not wanting to waste time anymore I bought the computers for the kids setup the firewalls so they cannot touch any of the other computers in the inner circle of the firewall and used Norton’s Ghost on the hard-drives so I could quickly recover them when the time came. No my wife’s computer is spyware free and the kids machines get slicked and re-loaded twice a month.
Having seen several articles in recent days that talk about this very issue I thought that I would pass this on to those of you whose kids are using the same computer as you are. My biggest piece of advice if you are not able to afford a separate machine for the kids is to 1st, keep all data that is vital to you and that you could not afford to loose on separated media. 2nd insure that you are using Microsoft restore and that you have a clean baseline restore point. 3rd use a product like Norton Ghost or similar program to build a image file of your current install so you can recover the machine when it gets blasted. [Infoworld] [Windley.com]