Guardian Control:

Guardian Control was a new feature in version 2. It basically allows you to limit the amount of time a user can play a game or completely stop someone from starting up the game. This is great news for kids and parents sharing a computer. It means that it can be set to stop children from playing the grownup violent games and can limit the amount of time they can spend playing in a given period of time.

The first thing to do is to activate the control for Guardian Control. This can be found in the General Settings area. All you have to do is to put a tick into the box to enable this feature.

Once set, a new option will appear in the menu system simply called Guardian Control. If you go into this option you will see the following screen. As you can see here I have selected the game Football Manager 2008 to try this out with. You can begin first by entering a password into the box so that the profile becomes locked. If you leave it at this the profile is presently locked unless you enter the password. However you can also setup a Play Block which will allow the game to be played during certain times of the day. This is what we will now do.

I clicked on the Manage Groups button to launch the setup of the Guardian Control profile. This is where you enter the Play Block Setting to limit the times when the game can be played.

By clicking on the New Group button the following window is brought up enabling you to give your group a name. Something descriptive about the settings should be used. If you wanted to enable 2 hours worth of gaming after dinner then something like 'After Dinner 6pm - 8pm" or “Kids” should be used to enable you to know what has been setup.

Once you have entered the name you are taken back to the main screen again. Here you now need to setup the Start and Stop time periods. This is where to limit the amount of time the game can be accessed. You can also determine what happens at the end of the play period. Here I have selected to display a message warning and then to log off 10 minutes later. To add these settings to the profile all you need to do is to click the Add button.

As you can see the settings have now been added to the profile. If you want to then you can also add more times to the profile.
All you have to do now is to make sure that the Play Block Group now reads the correct profile name and hit the Update button. This game will then only be able to be played during the hours you have specified or by entering the password.

I played around with the Guardian Control settings some more and it all seems to work fine. The only problem I can see is that when the warning message pops up, some games may crash and return the computer to the desktop or worse yet lockup and need restarting.

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