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80 of 84 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Loaded with features but poor on delivery, September 27, 2003
If name recognition was all that mattered, Net Nanny would win hands down. It is probably the best known parental control software out there. But as with anything, name isn't everything. At first glance, Net nanny is quite impressive. It has a host of features that any parent, seeking to protect their children from pornography and predators on the internet, would find useful. Among them are: Site blocking, to prevent kids for accessing sites with objectionable or pornographic content. (Net Nanny Contains a long list of prohibited sites which users may add to the list if they wish.); E-mail and Instant Messenger monitoring, to protect against predators; blocking of Newsgroups and file sharing clients; Content blocking and censoring to prevent kids from reading content with objectionable language, including a list of words users can add to; and Internet usage blocking to block out when a child may or may not use the internet. It even has a feature to prevent kids from changing the computer's clock to get around it. All of these features seemed to work fine for the most part (see below). Web sites on the restricted list were indeed blocked, and the content censoring worked quite well. Net Nanny automatically censors objectionable language as the web pages load, replacing restricted words with Number signs: ########. Net Nanny's features all are quite useful, but Net Nanny has some downsides more than make up for them. For the record, my computer is an AMD Athlon XP 2100 running Windows 98. One of the first things I noticed when I started using Net Nanny was that my internet connection suddenly began to lag. The computer I used it on is connected to dial-up, which is not quick to begin with. With Net Nanny installed, pages that had taken 3 seconds to come up before were taking 10 to 15 seconds longer, sometimes more. While this might not seem like much, when a user is doing browsing or web searches, this lag time can add up quickly. In addition, some web pages didn't even come up at all, instead showing a blank internet window, causing me to have to hit the refresh button to get the page to load properly. This wasn't for sites with objectionable content; this was for normal sites that Net Nanny should have had no problem with. While this problem didn't happen for most page loads, it happened often enough that it became a nuisance. What was even worse than clean sites not loading properly was Net Nanny's tendency to allow pages to be shown, even though they had objectionable content. Net Nanny would give a warning message and proceed to load the page anyway. Sometimes it would display the message on a completely innocent website with no objectionable content at all, leaving me bewildered, wondering what was wrong with it. This only happened with sites that were not on Net Nanny's list of restricted sites. Restricted sites WERE blocked properly, but since sites with objectionable content on the net are endless, this understandably made me wonder if it was working properly. I'm not sure if this was an intentional design feature (to get around blocking innocent sites l;ike news reports, etc) or a flaw in the program itself. Another issue I came across is that Net Nanny appears to slow down the computer altogether. Whenever the machine accessed the internet, my mouse stuttered across the screen. Other programs acted in much the same manner, making multitasking difficult and annoyingly jumpy. This problem was perhaps the most aggravating of what I've listed so far, and enough to make me uninstall the program. Worst of all, now that I've removed Net Nanny from my computer, some of these issues are still occuring. I had no problem prior to installing Net Nanny, so I can only assume it left pieces of itself on my computer. Bottom line, look for a parental control program other than Net Nanny. It's not worth the aggravation. I know that I wish I'd checked for reviews before I bought it. It seems that I'm not alone with these issues.
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