Net Nanny respects your right to control how your family uses the Internet, based on your own unique needs and values. Net Nanny allows you to restrict and monitor Web sites, Email, IRC chats, and newsgroups that may be offensive and/or inappropriate for children.

Average Customer Review: ( 19 customer reviews )
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But as with anything, name isn't everything.

At first glance, Net nanny is quite impressive. It has a host of features that any parent, seeking to protect their children from pornography and predators on the internet, would find useful. Among them are:

Site blocking, to prevent kids for accessing sites with objectionable or pornographic content. (Net Nanny Contains a long list of prohibited sites which users may add to the list if they wish.); E-mail and Instant Messenger monitoring, to protect against predators; blocking of Newsgroups and file sharing clients; Content blocking and censoring to prevent kids from reading content with objectionable language, including a list of words users can add to; and Internet usage blocking to block out when a child may or may not use the internet. It even has a feature to prevent kids from changing the computer's clock to get around it.

All of these features seemed to work fine for the most part (see below). Web sites on the restricted list were indeed blocked, and the content censoring worked quite well. Net Nanny automatically censors objectionable language as the web pages load, replacing restricted words with Number signs: ########.

Net Nanny's features all are quite useful, but Net Nanny has some downsides more than make up for them. For the record, my computer is an AMD Athlon XP 2100 running Windows 98.

One of the first things I noticed when I started using Net Nanny was that my internet connection suddenly began to lag. The computer I used it on is connected to dial-up, which is not quick to begin with. With Net Nanny installed, pages that had taken 3 seconds to come up before were taking 10 to 15 seconds longer, sometimes more. While this might not seem like much, when a user is doing browsing or web searches, this lag time can add up quickly.

In addition, some web pages didn't even come up at all, instead showing a blank internet window, causing me to have to hit the refresh button to get the page to load properly. This wasn't for sites with objectionable content; this was for normal sites that Net Nanny should have had no problem with. While this problem didn't happen for most page loads, it happened often enough that it became a nuisance.

What was even worse than clean sites not loading properly was Net Nanny's tendency to allow pages to be shown, even though they had objectionable content. Net Nanny would give a warning message and proceed to load the page anyway. Sometimes it would display the message on a completely innocent website with no objectionable content at all, leaving me bewildered, wondering what was wrong with it. This only happened with sites that were not on Net Nanny's list of restricted sites. Restricted sites WERE blocked properly, but since sites with objectionable content on the net are endless, this understandably made me wonder if it was working properly. I'm not sure if this was an intentional design feature (to get around blocking innocent sites l;ike news reports, etc) or a flaw in the program itself.

Another issue I came across is that Net Nanny appears to slow down the computer altogether. Whenever the machine accessed the internet, my mouse stuttered across the screen. Other programs acted in much the same manner, making multitasking difficult and annoyingly jumpy. This problem was perhaps the most aggravating of what I've listed so far, and enough to make me uninstall the program.

Worst of all, now that I've removed Net Nanny from my computer, some of these issues are still occuring. I had no problem prior to installing Net Nanny, so I can only assume it left pieces of itself on my computer.

Bottom line, look for a parental control program other than Net Nanny. It's not worth the aggravation. I know that I wish I'd checked for reviews before I bought it. It seems that I'm not alone with these issues.

24 of 25 found the following review helpful:

Does it really do what it says?Nov 08, 2004
By Akiko Fukada
I got Net Nanny to test and see whether it really blocks "surprises" from teen and children. So, I set up the account with restricted access to the internet. The level was about 75% restricted. When I opened some sites, it was a surprise indeed. I was able to open Playboy.com with ease and navigate. On the other hand, my research group website was blocked and so was The Economist website!!

I am sure there are pop-ups and links on websites which can lead a child to sites like Playboy. They DO have the option of adding websites to their "restricted websites" page but Net Nanny has not done her homework if a well-known site like playboy is not blocked!! I wonder what other websites remain to be blocked.

(...)

18 of 18 found the following review helpful:

Waste of MoneySep 17, 2004
By Scrap Slow
This software does not work on my Windows XP operating system. A call to the Help Desk costs $19.95: almost as much as the original software cost! I strongly regret buying this. I had high hopes that I would be able to control the amount of time my teenage daughter spends on the computer while I am at work, but this tool is not the solution.

12 of 12 found the following review helpful:

Very good piece of softwareJan 20, 2003
By M. J. Jenkins "macready"
Great software for kids.

I got this software in order to keep my kids safe from the dangers of the internet.

One excellent aspect of this program is that it disconnects from ALL internet acticity at the specified times. Other applications (such as Cyber Patrol) only stop web page surfing, but Net Nanny 5 stops activity to MSN, Yahoo messengers etc.

One slight problem is that the program recognized that I was entering a 'dodgy' site and told me that downloading would be stopped. But it carried on.

However, you can get sent daily or weekly reports on any activities. You can also record chat sessions, or only record them when illegal words have been entered.

Download the free 15 day trial first.

Hope this helps.

28 of 33 found the following review helpful:

Good features, terrible side effectsApr 06, 2003
By Jeff "filmfanman"
After downloading this software, there was a noticeable negative impact to our computer. Lock ups almost constantly, slow internet speed, and even slower response on other PC applications that should not have been impacted by this program. We were running this on a Windows 98 OS with a PIII 600mhz computer and 128m RAM. Rather disappointing.

I like this program's features but not at the expense of having to re-boot my computer constantly. I'd look elsewhere for a good Internet Protection software program.

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