Integard - Our winner - Feature packed, easy to configure and well priced.

  Safe Eyes - Great product but high price, limited features and few issues found during testing place it in second place.

  Cyber Patrol - Our Second Runner up - Overall a good product but has less features and is complicated to configure.

  Net Nanny - Well known product but has been surpassed by several other products.

  Optenet - Performs well but lacks the features to make it attractive

  K9 - Free - But only performs web filtering and is only single user.

  FilterPak - Very simple and easy to use but lacks essential features.

  Parental Control Bar - Great Free product, If you are after very basic web filtering only.

  Vista Parental Controls - Decent performance in filtering area but only available on Windows Vista.

  Cyber Sentinel - Does more monitoring than filtering.

Windows Vista Parental controls is an inbuilt feature within Windows Vista that allows some control over particular windows accounts including the filtering of web content.

Vista’s parental controls scored top marks here because it comes pre-installed on all Windows Vista machines and only needs to be enabled which can easily be done via the control panel.

Vista Parental Controls has a range of features that make up an all round content filter such as web page blocking, program control and time management. However it does lack essential features that make a good filter such as chat logging/filtering, email monitoring/filtering, data limits and personal information protection.

Vista Parental Controls is very easy to use and is integrated well into the operating system to minimise conflict. The user interface is laid out well and was easy to understand and configure and the help within Windows is very informative.

Effectiveness

Adult Content      7/10
- Was able to bring up various inappropriate pictures using the image search functions of all popular search engines but it did successfully block most of the adult websites.
Filter Cirumvention      4/10
- The filter was easily circumvented using any proxy site and if you didn’t know of any you could easily search for and find them.
Obscene      7/10
- Once again the majority of sites tested were blocked but I was able to view thumbnails and some websites.
Crime      3/10
- Vista Parental Controls performed very poorly in this area and let through almost all the sites tested that related to crime and criminal activity.
Over-blocking      8/10
- Vista Parental Controls performed very well here and all appropriate but borderline sites tested were let through. When a site that needed to be viewed but was blocked an easy instant override feature was available using the administrator password.

Free with Windows Vista

Easy to use and setup

Excellent program control options

Good documentation within Windows Help

Only available with Windows Vista

No chat monitoring, filtering or reporting

No email filtering or reporting

No personal information or keyword feature

No online support or help

If you are using Vista this feature will be available within the operating system and it would be worth while trying to see if it meets your needs. It provides a decent barrier against inappropriate content but if you are looking for more of a complete package then I would suggest using a third party filter.