How times have changed. Now broadband Internet connections, WiFi networks have opened up web access to a huge range of devices from mobile phones through to games consoles and laptops, any of which has the potential to be used for nefarious purposes. Fortunately there are a number of ways in which the average home user can fairly easily block or at least monitor their family use of the Internet, this article will discuss a few of the FREE options that you might want to consider.

1. Setup your own Internet firewall.

This first option is the most complex and is probably best suited to those familiar with installing their own PC operating systems. If you have an old PC lying in the garage that used to run Windows 98 that no one wants anymore then you may be able to re-use it as a firewall between your home broadband connection and your network and home PC’s. All that is typically needed then is a pair of network cards, one to connect to your home broadband router and the other to your internal network/WiFi access point. Next head over to a site such as ClarkConnect.com and download their Community software. The download will be an ISO file which you will need to burn to a CD to use to install the system onto your old Windows 98 PC. When you boot up the old PC with this CD in the drive it will take you through an install routine that will help you setup your server. Once setup the server is administered from another PC on the network through a browser interface and the firewalls web filter ( DansGuardian ) can be enabled and configured.

ClarkConnect can actually provide a number of other services to PC’s on your network including email services, file storage, DNS and DHCP services, SQL and much more.

2. Use the facilities of your Operating System.

OS X Leopard introduced a fairly comprehensive Parental Controls solution to Mac users which allows parents to setup accounts for the kids that allow controlled access to applications and Internet services. Not only can you block access to inappropriate web sites, but you can also restrict email usage to only send/receive to and from addresses in your address book, limit the usage of iChat and specify the amount of time each application can be used each day.

To be fair to PC users, Windows Vista does also have a parental controls facility, but we won’t discuss that here….

3. Install 3rd Party Web Filter Software

Before Leopard and Vista the PC and Mac market relied on 3rd party add ons to provide web filtering solutions. Many of these products are not free however, and in some cases rely on an initial purchase followed by ongoing maintenance payments to continue to be able to use the software. There are a small number of free options though if you still have Windows XP or OS X versions preceding Leopard.

K9 from Bluecoat

One nice and free solution is K9 from BlueCoat Software which provides over 60 categories of site to block, allows custom sites to be allowed or blocked, produces reports of sites accessed/blocked and more. As a free solution this is well worth a look and is certainly better than some of the commercial solutions that you would have to pay for.

Blue Coat have also recently released a beta version of K9 for OS X, this requires OS X 10.4.7 or higher.

4. Setup an OpenDNS Account

OpenDNS is a replacement DNS service with a difference. DNS (Domain Name Service ) is the service that computers use to work out the correct address for a particular computer or web site on the network. When you type www.google.com into your browser toolbar your computer uses DNS to lookup the IP address of the Google web server and then goes and requests the web page from that server.

OpenDNS operate a DNS service that you can configure your computers to use instead of your normal ISP’s DNS servers. Once you have created an account and configured your computers to point to OpenDNS you can login to your account Dashboard and define which categories of web sites you would like blocked. After that any computers on your broadband network attempting to get to sites in those categories will get an OpenDNS blocked page instead. Not only that but as the administrator of the account you can see which sites were visited and which were blocked. Obviously a determined teenager can easily go around this by reconfiguring their computer with your ISP’s DNS addresses, but for many this will be adequate protection and offers the benefit of not requiring any software to be installed on your computers.

5. Switch off your Internet router.

Obviously a draconian step, but if you want the ultimate control the simplest solution may be to go back to the old days when control was easier ! Increasingly though with things like Apple TV, Nintendo Wii, Xbox Live and other sorts of Internet connected home entertainment this is probably not a sensible solution and you will need to investigate one of the other options discussed above.

This all changed last weekend though when I decided I would take a brand new HP 2710p Tablet PC which had just been delivered to work, home to have a play with. The 2710p is HPs latest tablet which replaces the older tc4400. It is slim, silver and very sleek and certainly surpasses the tc4400 and the Toshiba tablets as far as style is concerned. In line with current trends in reducing carbon footprints the laptop came in a fairly small box with only minimal packaging, a power lead and a system restore CD. I have to admit I was quite looking forward to seeing what Vista was like on a tablet, and so set to the task of setting it up.

Now since switching to Mac a few years ago I think I have become a little spoilt as regards setting up new machines. Anyone who has ever unboxed and powered up a new Mac will know that the whole process takes no more than about 10-15 minutes and is so simple your 6 year old child could literally do it. I suppose I was half expecting the job of setting up Vista to be at least comparable to this. Clearly I was wrong.

Switching on the 2710p was the first trick. The power switch located at the front of the machine is a small silver block that has to be slid to the right to switch the machine on. Unfortunately the switch is quite awkwardly positioned and pretty stiff. The same goes for the switch to release the screen, in fact it is literally a two handed job to push this catch to the right and lift the lid at the same time.

Once powered up and open for business the process of setting up Vista began, and what a process it was! From initial selection of 32bit or 64bit variants of the OS ( to which there was no accompanying explanation of the pros and cons of each selection ) to the final restart after install took what seemed like an age. I did not time it as I wasn’t expecting it to be such an extended task, but it was easily an hour and a half, possibly longer. Then again after initial login the machine went away for a further session of disk whirring whilst additional software was installed ( presumably the Symantec suite which comes bundled with the machine ). From start to where I was able to actually login must have taken over 3 hours ! How can this be justified on a brand new machine straight from the supplier ?

Once I had gotten over this hurdle I thought I should at least be able to get on and evaluate what Vista was like, but that wasn’t to be either. The problem you see is that this machine was supplied as standard with 1Gb of RAM. Once booted around 900Mb of that is immediately grabbed by the OS, leaving the poor machine virtually crippled whilst it pages back and forth from disk. In fact once logged in the hard disk continued to clatter away virtually continuously even when there were no apps loaded. I had intended to install Office 2007 to see how that worked with Vista but the way the machine was limping along I decided that would be a fruitless thing to do. Quite literally this shiny new tablet PC felt like a 10 year old Pentium trying to run Windows XP.

Quite how HP can ship a PC in this state is beyond me. Any customer that goes through the pain of setting these machines up to be left with a laptop that runs so appallingly is almost certainly going to think twice about buying from them again. Now I know that you could argue that as a purchaser of a Vista machine I should know that I need to spec at least 2Gb of RAM, but the reality is most customer do not know this and they depend on the company supplying the hardware to spec the components to perform as required. Are HP purposely trying to encourage users to switch back to XP ? If not why don’t they spec their PC’s with adequate memory as standard to run Vista ? The extra cost to HP to include 2Gb instead of 1Gb must surely be only a few UKP ?

The alternative conclusion that customers may come to when they experience this, especially if they have an older Windows XP machine to compare to, is that Vista is the culprit. Certainly the first thing I did with this machine when I returned to work on Monday was to get it prepared to be “upgraded” to Windows XP Tablet Edition! This movement towards reloading XP is growing fast and is without doubt a part of the drive towards consumers switching to OS X and Macs. From my personal experience over the last 12 months I have seen at least 6 friends and relatives move to Mac and not one of them has regretted it or would ever go back to Windows.

I think Microsoft have some serious re-thinking to do. This is a view shared by a growing number of industry trend setters. John C Dvorak covers this very topic in his recent post entitled The Vista Death Watch.

Certainly makes you glad you switched don’t it ?