Customer Reviews

PG Key

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I purchased PG Key after seeing it on The Today Show. I agreed with what the child psychologist said about the importance of parental monitoring. It installed very easily, pretty much just plug it in and create a password. You do need to activate PG Key to get the most recent blocked site list. I have been using it for about a week and so far, I am VERY VERY happy with this product. It does everything I hoped it would as easily as they promised. I highly recommend it for any parent!

Others have said this was easy to install, but Norton Internet Security recognized the PG Key as a threat and ripped its program to shreds. I never could get the thing to install, and found no online help dealing with this issue.

I purchased a PGKey after a recommendation from a fellow single-parent who is a PGKey user. I am not computer-savvy and I was concerned that I would have trouble installing the product and getting it to work correctly for me (my kids run circles around my computer skills!). However, as represented by the person recommending PGKey to me, this product was easy to install and to operate. After I initially set up PGKey, it has operated as represented and with multiple children as multiple users.

I really like the web filtering and blocking capabilities and I have seen my kids try to purposefully search for something I don't want them to and they are unable to do so. This makes me feel so much better about my youngest now being "web-enabled" herself. The recording feature is easy to use and my kids now know that everything they do on the computer - whether email, social networking or web browsing is seen by me. I have also been able to get the kids to spend "quality" time on the computer when they are on it because, through PGKey, I am able to limit their computer usage to my decision of one hour per day. This means my kids get on the computer, do what they need to do (unless I provide them with additional time)on the computer in a day, and are then required to go do another activity that they should be doing as kids. Thanks PGKey for enabling me to parent my children when it comes to their computer usage!

I recommend PGKey to others regularly.

Ordered 2 PG Keys and they were shipped promptly. Had this for a couple of weeks and having played with them, here is my take...

This works as said, but the software is poorly designed. I have two machines, for my two children. I created a PG Key account and registered both the keys. The software doesn't allow me to create two different attributes for these two keys. For example, I would like my older child to have access to some social networking sites like myspace, but wouldn't want my younger one there yet. But the software doesn't allow me to set two different set of rules. This is a no-brainer and a natural expectation that I should be able to assign a set of rules for a particular key based on the key's serial number. In fact, they ask for the serial number during registration, and that's why I'm baffled that they didn't even think about this obvious usage model. The work around is to create one unique account and assign it to every key you own. So, I created another account, using a different e-mail ID, but I couldn't find any option to reassign one of the keys to the new account. So, I uninstalled the software so that I can start again, but the uninstall is not clean. If you plug in the key after uninstall, windows doesn't pop up a "New Hardware Found" message and the device doesn't show up as a drive in My Computer. So, I had to go into Device Manager and manually remove the driver for this. Then I re-installed it, but this is time it automatically connected to my original account, but couldn't find any option to reassign it to the new account. After some frustrations, left it alone.

There is another design flaw. This flaw makes one of the most usable features useless. This product has a Block-All-Websites-except-those-in-this-list fearure. I liked this feature. But the draw back is that if you set abc.com as an allowed website, but that website links to a bunch of other websites which are not in your list, then abc.com will not be rendered properly. If I put abc.com in the allowed list, it means that I trust abc.com and that it should allow all other links and pointers from this web-site. The other option is to view the source of the page, find what all other websites that are being pointed to and put them all in the allowed list...which is cumbersome and not everyone can do. So, this feature is useless.

Such a promising product, but such poor execution. Would be good if they put their effor in making this product more professional instead of all the marketing campaign.

Hate to return it, but I might not have a choice here.