My 3 year old daughter Lil (her blog nickname) recently started to game on our family PC. As a Microsoft mom, I’m proud she’s learning how to use a computer and has quickly become comfortable with controlling the PC at a basic level. Granted, she isn’t doing much other than going to Nick Jr.’s website (saved into our favorites in IE) to play Dora the Explorer, Backyardigans and Yo Gabba Gabba! games. Even though her online time is short, I want to ensure she stays safe, avoiding advertisements and websites not meant for her little eyes. I’m in the early stages of having to think about online parameters, house rules and talking with my kids about proper online behavior, but this is a good time to start asking questions about tools available and how to establish some proper online safety etiquette for our household.

As this is a big topic, I plan to write a few times on keeping your kids safe online over the next couple months. To kick things off, I wanted to share what I was able to do in my house very quickly to ensure my kids are protected, with just a few easy steps using Windows Live Family Safety. Note that Family Safety is the replacement for MSN Parental Controls which is no longer being updated. I’ve never had to monitor other accounts in my household and even though I knew the capabilities of Family Safety, I had never actually applied the product. What I discovered is that setting up parameters for my house was really easy, so I wanted to share how to do this and encourage other parents to use this product to help protect your children, which will help you breathe a little easier. And remember, Windows Live Family Safety, part of the Windows Live Essentials suite of products, is FREE! You can download the latest beta here.

What does Windows Live Family Safety do?

• Gives parents control over when Windows will let your child use the computer, what games your child can play, and what programs your child can run. If your children use multiple computers, the choices will roam with them to each computer; they simply need to log in with their username and password to any PC in your house already configured with Family Safety.
• Filters images, which is helpful if your child visits websites that allow other users to upload images. This feature works best on Windows 7 machines with faster processing power.
• SafeSearch is locked for Bing, Google, Yahoo! and other popular search engines to prevent your child from seeing adult content in search results.
• Has contact management, which provides parents control to monitor or restrict the contact list for their child in Windows Live Hotmail, Messenger and Spaces.
• Provides requests management, which allows requests from a child to a parent to be aggregated in a single daily email allowing you to manage them more efficiently.
• Restricts ads, which means children’s Live IDs that are added through Family Safety and logged into the Windows Live network, will not see advertisements when using Windows Live services.

Examples of how I’m personally using Family Safety in my house:

• I set up a rule in my house for using the Internet, which includes blocking downloads, which I only had to do once. The choices I made for Lil on the Family Safety website apply to any computer she uses in our house, as they are all configured to run Family Safety.
• Since I work during the day and I have at-home childcare, I’m not always aware of how much time Lil spends online gaming. I can now (from any online location) log into the Family Safety website and view activity reports to see how much time she’s spending online gaming. The report also contains websites my child visited.
• I set time limits so she can only game during certain hours of the day and can restrict how much time she spends on the computer.
• I mentioned that I allow Lil to go onto Nick Jr.’s website to game, though Family Safety also offers a list of child-friendly websites to visit which I’ve started to explore with my preschooler.

How easy is this really? You’ll be amazed! Here are the simple to follow steps to get you started:

• Download the latest Windows Live Essentials beta.
• Once installed, go to the Windows start button and type in Family Safety in the search bar.
• The Family Safety screen will pop up. Note, you will need to sign in with a Windows Live ID to set up Family Safety. If you don’t have one, click here. The main screen will show which accounts are set up as Standard Users, and which have Admin rights. Make sure you add your kids as Standard Users, if they aren’t already there. Microsoft recommends that each child has their own Windows account so you can customize different settings for each child.
• Once you have completed this, click “save.”
• The main screen will then show you a link to the Windows Live Family Safety website, providing you with all the latest information on the accounts you monitor and allowing you to customize all your settings.
• Since this is all linked to your personal Windows Live account, the great thing is that you can monitor your kids’ online activities anywhere. This includes the ability for your children to make requests to visit websites and add contacts, even when you’re not at home.
• You can also view detailed step-by-step instructions on the Family Safety website located here.

In an upcoming post, I will interview a program manager for Family Safety to go into further depth on things you should know about keeping you kids safe online, including how to get the most out of free tools available to you. If you have questions about Windows Live Family Safety, please post comments. I will be picking from the top questions to include in my upcoming interview. Follow me on Twitter @WinMommyLisa.

I’m sitting here in on my in-laws’ deck overlooking beautiful Lake Chelan. Evan sleeping by my side, Audrey is down for a nap and the house is otherwise empty, so I thought I’d take my mother-in-law’s HP G62 out for a test drive. Yes, this is the same one I was conscripted to configure just a few weeks ago, but last time I was giving it the quickie setup (i.e., installing Microsoft Security Essentials, Windows Live Essentials Beta, and Office 2010), so didn’t have the chance to fully put it through its paces.

The HP G62 is part of HP’s line of everyday computers, meaning it’s optimized for light internet work, basic productivity tasks like writing Word docs, and playing music and movies. It’s a value priced machine – MSRP starts at $499.99, and my mother-in-law got her model for a little over $500 at a major retailer. For that price, you get a lot of machine. The G62 comes with a brand-new Intel Core i3 processor, 4 gigs of RAM, and a 320GB 7200 rpm HDD. Graphics are Intel Integrated HD which put out respectable Windows Experience Index score of 4.2 for desktop graphics and 4.8 for gaming graphics. That’s not top-shelf power, but if you’re just watching DVDs, playing casual games or streaming some web video it’s more than enough to give you a great experience.

As with all HPs, the 15”, 1366 x 768 display is gorgeous. It’s very bright but not too glossy; out here on the deck in bright sunlight the screen is still easy to read. Sound is powered by Altec Lansing speakers which produce solid, deep sound that’s better than most laptops I’ve tried in this price range – you don’t get the tinny, hollow reverberation that you find on cheaper speakers. As someone who’s permanently tethered to his Zune collection (or Pandora), that’s a big plus.

Even though this is part of HP’s value line, they didn’t skimp on design. The chassis is imprinted polycarbonate with a light polygon texture and the default out-of-the-box wallpaper matches the case design, which is kind of cool and a nice touch that brings the PC together inside and out. My favorite bit about the G62’s design is the touchpad – or should I say “lack of touchpad”. Unlike most laptops that have a dedicated, defined touchpad that looks like at touchpad, the G62 doesn’t. Its touchpad is seamless with the rest of the palm rest, so the chin of the laptop is completely unbroken (aside from the right and left mouse buttons). That’s an unusual design choice, but I like it and it’s something I wish more PC manufacturers would do. I’m a minimalist by nature, so anything that cleans up the façade of my PC makes me feel all Zen inside.

I’ve only had a chance to work with the G62 for a few hours, but I like what I see so far. Performance while working on this doc in Word 2010 was snappy and Internet Explorer running Twitter, Facebook, and multiple other tabs like CNN.com, Weather.com, The Consumerist, Gizmodo, Engadget, The Windows Experience Blog, and my favorite non-tech blog, The Sartorialist, was smooth and hang-free even when playing video on both Giz and Engadget simultaneously.

If you’re in the market for a solid 15” laptop and you’re working off of a modest budget, put the HP G62 on your list. For around $500, it’s a tough box to beat.

Have a question about this or any other PC?  Post a comment, hit me on Twitter, or Ask Ben Anything via email.  Your question might appear in my monthly Ask Ben Anything Q&A column!

Users are continuously getting smarter and more educated about the things criminals are doing on the web. Because of this, the criminals have to change their tactics. One of the ways they are doing this is by buying ads on prominent web sites, and finding ways to serve up malicious content through those ads. Some of these websites might be some of your favorite websites you visit regularly and you might be thinking “hey, I only visit good websites” – unfortunately even “good” websites (websites not intending to harm the reader in any way) can be affected.

Many websites make the money it takes to operate through displaying ads from an ad network. Through that ad network, a website can unknowingly display a malicious ad on their website which puts their readers at risk. CNET recently posted an article about ad networks from Google, Fox, and Yahoo serving out malicious advertisements. This is not something that affects just one ad network, it’s an industry issue.

TechCrunch (a favorite website of mine) is a recent example of a website unknowingly delivering malicious advertisements from 3rd parties to their readers. A few pages on TechCrunch were blocked by Internet Explorer 8’s SmartScreen Filter. The SmartScreen Filter in Internet Explorer 8 was blocking several posts from TechCrunch due to malicious content being included in ads that TechCrunch’s ad network was serving to the readers of TechCrunch.

We were able to see the SmartScreen Filter in action keeping the TechCrunch readers using Internet Explorer 8 safe from the malicious ads.

Since launch, Internet Explorer 8 has blocked over 560 million malware sites. This averages out to be about 3 million blocks per day. Because of this ongoing thread with malicious advertisements, it is important to use a browser that keeps you safe and protected.

Dean Hachamovitch finished his demo of Internet Explorer 9 at MIX10 a short while ago. He did a variety of demos for folks to see. Many of these you can try for yourself with the Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview on the Test Drive site. To do these demos, a variety of Windows PCs were used. I thought I would call out those PCs and their specs.

In the first part of the demo, Dean used an HP xw8400 Workstation. Dean used this PC for demoing interoperability and standards (same markup!). This PC comes with dual Intel Xeon 5150 2.66GHz processors, 4GB of memory, 150GB hard drive, and NVIDIA Quadro FX 1500 graphics.

For the GPU-Powered HTML5 demo Steven Sinofsky, President of the Windows and Windows Live Division, dropped by to take part in showing off IE9 with Dean. Both he and Dean used identical PCs for this demo. The Windows PC they both used was the Dell Studio XPS 1640. The Studio XPS 1640 models they used had a Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 2.4GHz processor, 4GB DDR2 800MHz, ATI Mobility Radeon 3670 graphics, and a 500GB 7200 RPM Drive.

For the HTML5 YouTube and Video Carousel demos, Dean used the Dell Studio 1555. This PC comes with an Intel Dual Core T9600 2.8GHz processor, 4GB of memory, a 250GB 7200 RPM SATA hard drive, and ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4500 graphics.

Special note from me: the Studio 1555 is the very same model I use as my everyday laptop here at work. I refer to it as “The Goat” due to the special design on the back. You can see the design here. Dell’s Design Studio has 200+ designs to choose from for customizing your Dell laptop.

The netbook Dean used was the HP Mini 311 which comes standard with an Intel Atom N270 1.6Ghz processor, 1GB of DDR3 memory, 160GB 7200 RPM SATA hard drive, and NVIDIA Ion graphics.

You’ll notice a few of these PCs use NVIDIA graphics. NVIDIA posted a blog post earlier today about GPU computing and highlights IE9.

The breadth of different types of Windows PCs used in today’s demos of IE9 at MIX10 shows how the browser takes advantage of the power of modern hardware while utilizing fewer resources.

Yesterday was Day 1 of MIX10 in Las Vegas and a lot of really cool things were announced – specifically around developing for Windows Phone 7 Series. You’ll find the gist of the Day 1 news from MIX10 here on the MIX10 website. Today is proving to be an equally exciting day as yesterday with Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager for Internet Explorer, taking the stage for Day 2 Keynote to show off what we’re doing with Internet Explorer 9. Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) is the next version of our Internet Explorer web browser. Steven Sinofsky first gave an early look at IE9 last year at PDC09. But today at MIX10, Dean is officially going beyond the “early look” phase by diving deeper into the specific investments we’re making to the platform behind IE9 and delivering code in the form of a Platform Preview. To be specific, we are highlighting 3 key investments we’re making in IE9 today.

Performance, specifically with JavaScript: We are announcing a new JavaScript engine for IE9 which is designed to make Internet Explorer faster. This new JavaScript engine for IE9 places us faster than the shipping version of Firefox today on Webkit.org’s SunSpider benchmark test.

Standards and Interoperability: We are committed to the ideal of having the same markup (tags, script, and language) work across all the different browsers. This makes it easy for developers to develop their websites. With this commitment, HTML5 is at the center of IE9, and IE9 will include extensive support for DOM, CSS3, SVG standards and XHTML.

GPU-powered HTML5: We believe that HTML5 applications will take advantage of the latest in PC advancements to offer a truly graphically rich and functional experience that customers and developers want them (and expect them) to be. IE9 is the first browser designed to take advantage of modern hardware by shifting from the CPU to the GPU for hardware-accelerated SVG, enhanced JavaScript performance, and GPU-powered HTML5. By moving IE9 to the GPU and taking advantage of the latest Direct2D technology in Windows, webpages will load faster, graphics will be improved and users can take advantage of the modern hardware in their Windows PCs while taking fewer resources from their PC.

With these key investments for IE9, this translates into a great opportunity for developers to build rich websites.

For more from Dean, he’s posted a blog post about his MIX10 Keynote over on the IEBlog. I definitely suggest checking it out. You can also watch the keynote on demand here.

In talking about the platform behind IE9, we wanted to give developers a way to try out the investment we’ve done to-date with IE9. Today we’re announcing the Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview. The Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview is simply a preview of the platform subsystems code that is “under the hood” of the browser. This Platform Preview is designed specifically for developers so that they can get an early sense of some of the changes in the browser including capabilities, performance, and standards support (investments I mention above).

The Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview includes the IE9 Test Drive website that presents a series of tests that allow developers to test the functionality of the investments we’re making with HTML5, Java Script, etc. To ensure we’re keeping developers actively engaged and aware of our continued work in key investments in IE9, we’re also announcing today that we’re making a commitment to deliver updates to this build approximately every 8 weeks leading up to the beta of Internet Explorer 9.

One thing I need to be clear about – the Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview is not a full-fledged web browser to be used for everyday browsing of the Internet (it doesn’t even have a “back” button). It is designed specifically to run side-by-side to your regular browser and is simply a preview of the platform investments we’re making in IE9 designed for developers to learn how to take advantage of these investments in their websites. For everyday browsing of the Internet, I highly recommend continuing to use Internet Explorer 8. If you’re not necessarily a developer (like me) but want to get an idea on what we’re going to be doing with IE9 and the direction we’re going, I certainly recommend giving the Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview a test drive and try out some of the tests we’ve included. In particular, seeing how it performs on new hardware is pretty exciting.

We’re very excited today to be able to talk more about the work we’re doing in Internet Explorer 9. As we move toward the beta for IE9, you can expect to see more posts from me on IE9 moving forward.

MIX10 officially begins tomorrow in Las Vegas. MIX is an annual event we put on for designers and developers to learn about Microsoft’s broad web platform and tools. Essentially we’re bringing a bunch of designers and developers together to talk about bringing together the clients, servers and cloud services to create great rich web applications.

What an exciting week this week will be! I won’t be attending MIX10 myself this year, so I will be joining the many who could not attend by watching MIX10 unfold online – and live.

The Day 1 keynote and Day 2 keynote will begin at 9am PDT on Monday and Tuesday and will be delivered by Scott Guthrie, Joe Belfiore, Dean Hachamovitch, Doug Purdy, and Bill Buxton. These keynotes will be streamed live at the MIX10 website.

Immediately following each keynote (10:30am PDT), Channel 9 Live will begin streaming with a ton of live content throughout the day and a lot of special guests. You can check out the full Channel 9 Live schedule here and who will be stopping by! They have a lot of great people coming by – from Scott Hanselman to Dean Hachamovitch to Loic Le Meur from Seesmic! Again, all of this will take place on the MIX10 website. You can submit questions through @c9live to be answered on Channel 9 Live throughout each day. Go ahead and send your questions, tell them Brandon sent you ;-)

There is also a MIX10 Virtual Press Room set up on the Microsoft News Center for all kinds of press materials and links to MIX10 content from around the web. You can follow @MIXEvent for the latest on MIX10 on Twitter as well.

And of course we’ll have some blog posts coming this week around MIX10 too! I will also be doing some tweeting from @windowsblog as well.

Like I said, this week is shaping up to be very exciting!