Customer Reviews

Webroot Child Safe

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

 

 

This software works exactly as advertized, and has proved to be a vital part of being sensitive to the needs of my teen son. The installation was flawless, completely undetectable, has settings that let you regulate the amount of information you want to gather on the activities on your computer, and doesn't have any detectable impact on the performance of the computer. I would highly recommend use of this product.

My wife is happy beause this program lets us limit our childrens computer time to a certain amount per child per day or per week. It can also be used to limit the parents computer time to certain times.

Things that I don't like about it are that it seems to reset what the power button does from hibernating to powering off. This tends to lock up my computer running windows XP, as it does a logoff before shutting down. The other night, I was installing a microsoft service pack that takes 40 minutes to install on my PC using 100% CPU. The program was set-up to give 5 minutes warning before time was up, and a 1 minute warning before it boots you off. Well, I tried to hibernate to save my work, but it booted me off anyway (perhaps because of the high CPU utilization?), 30 minutes wasted. It seemed to reset my user passwords one time, but I just went into the child safe account and reset them to what I wanted. Another problem is to change user account settings, the user can't be logged in at the time (I use multi-account login on XP Home all the time).

The filtering isn't perfect. I suspect no filtering product is. I have no way to compare to other products.

It does let you restrict your browsing to a certain set of websites, and you can add a website to a list to allow you to view it even if it sets off one of the filtering criteria. You can customize the filtering categories per user, as well as the types chat / instant messaging each account can use, as well as which exact programs each user can run, as well as whether a regular user can install new programs. The options are very flexible and powerful.

Now if they would just fix the little problems that drive me crazy sometimes!

When installed, this program will not allow programs like Real Arcade to run, because they do something to the windows registry each time they run. That makes Child Safe useless to us, as our kids use Real Arcade a lot, and it is pretty safe (at least, we choose to trust it).

I asked tech support if there was a work-around, and they didn't reply, except for an automatic acknowledgment of receipt.

Two weeks later, I asked if they could reply please, and they didn't reply at all.

So, the program really is useless. I uninstalled the whole thing and would have forgotten about it, but then I saw this listing on Amazon and had to comment.

I found it relatively simple to install and begin using. Definitely reveals the keystrokes, screen shots etc. at whatever settings you wish. And it is stealth without the password. However, not until I began using it, did I discover it is NOT compatable with AOL users or email. This means if you want the results to be emailed to you and you're an AOL member it won't forward the info. There was no indication of this on Amazon.com or the packaging. Not until I contacted the manufacturer. So, even though it works, it is useless for me.