Monitoring Your Children

I'm concerned about where my children go on the Internet.  How can I monitor this?

The easiest ways to see where your son or daughter has been is by checking the History and Temporary Internet Files.  To do this: 

  1. Double click on the "My Computer" icon on your desktop.

  2. Double click on the "C:" drive of the PC.

  3. Find and double click on the "Windows" folder.  If you receive a message that mentions these files are hidden, click on the "show files" option.

  4. In the Windows folder is another folder name "Temporary Internet Files."  Double Click on this folder.

  5. Make sure that you can see the details of the files.  This can be done by clicking on "View" in the menu and "Details."

  6. You can scroll through these files and see the Cookies, images and other temporary files that have been stored on your PC.  Somewhere in the name or detail of the file, you should see the "www" portion of the website that has been visited.

You can also view the history by clicking on the "History" icon in the menu of your Internet Explorer.  A menu will open up on the left side of your screen and show you the websites that have been visited.  This will only show the pages that have been stored since the History was last emptied.  To increase the amount of time webpages stay in your History:

  1. Click on the "Tools" menu while Internet Explorer is open.

  2. Then, click on "Internet Options."

  3. On the "General" tab of the menu that pops up, you should see an area that says "Days to keep pages in History."  Set this to two or so days.  Note:  The longer you keep pages in your history, the more space you take up on your hard drive.  Keeping pages in your history for more than a few days is not recommended.

If all else fails, there are programs out there to help.  NetNanny and other similar programs can help you monitor and restrict the pages that your children can access.  Programs such as ICQ, MSN Messenger and AOL's Instant Messenger all have different ways of storing the histories.  

If you have any questions or would like for us to check out something for you, please give us a call at (270) 692-5503 or bring your PC to M & M Programming, Inc., 110 North Spalding Avenue, Lebanon, KY.  

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Copyright 2002