PC Pandora 7.0

Giving your child an Internet-capable computer opens up access to a whole world of content and connections, including nasty content and dangerous connections. Parental control utilities typically strike a balance between warding off dangers and giving parents insight into what the kids are doing online. PC Pandora 7.0 ($109.95 direct) focuses strongly on monitoring everything the child does, not so much on controlling specific activities.

Like WebWatcher ($169.95 direct, 4 stars) and Spector Pro 2011 ($99.95 direct, 3.5 stars), PC Pandora tracks absolutely everything that happens on the target computer. Every password typed, every chat conversation, every document created?nothing escapes these comprehensive monitors.

This kind of power could easily be used for illicit spying. When installing Spector Pro you must verify that you own the computer and that you'll notify users they're being watched. PC Pandora requires more than that. Its installer presents a lengthy and detailed privacy agreement. However, most users will click right past it just as they click past license agreements.

Snapshots, Sites, and Search
As soon as you install it and reboot the system, PC Pandora starts monitoring. By default it snaps a screenshot every 30 seconds; you can change that interval from one to 599 seconds. Spector Pro and WebWatcher both capture screenshots when specific events occur, so as not to miss anything important. PC Pandora's strictly time-based system might miss capturing some important event that would be snapped by the other two.

Naturally, the product monitors every website visited, now including secure (HTTPS) sites. It keeps a separate log of each Web request including requests that didn't result in displaying a webpage. For most parents, the simple list of websites will be more useful than the Web requests list.

In trying to get a handle on that Web requests tab, I found that PC Pandora's user manual and help system are outdated. Neither includes any mention of Web requests, and the "what's new" page in the help lists features that were already present two versions ago.

If the PC has a webcam, PC Pandora can snap a photo of the user every so often. It records search terms uses at popular search portals, notes files created, deleted, modified, or printed, and reports on peer-to-peer file transfers. It even tracks bandwidth use by different processes.

The local log viewer, accessed by pressing a special key combination and entering a password, displays all the saved information in detail. Most of the viewer's tabs include a big pie chart showing the top items in the category. For example, the Websites tab breaks down the top sites visited and the programs tab shows the most-used programs.

The Snapshots tab displays thumbnails for all the saved screen snapshots. Double-clicking a thumbnail opens the image at full size. From this view you can tap the left and right arrow keys to step through the images. That's as close as you'll get to the hands-free slideshow mode found in Spector Pro.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/MeQos7iTBDo/0,2817,2397597,00.asp

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