CNET Editors' review
The Internet is a wonderful thing, but not all of the content available online is appropriate for every user. This fact can be particularly anxiety-inducing for parents who want to give their kids access to the fun and educational aspects of the Internet but are wary of adult content, online predators, and other dangers. Integard Home is an extremely powerful and customizable program that prevents all kinds of problematic content from being viewed.
We've seen programs like Integard Home before, but none of them have been quite so comprehensive. The program offers six preconfigured profiles--young child, young teenager, late teenager, adult restricted, monitor only, and unrestricted--and users are also free to create custom profiles. The program also has eight levels of filtering, from unfiltered to maximum blocking. Integard separates Web sites into 42 different categories, from adult content and illegal activities to news and entertainment, and users can select whether to block or allow each category. Users can also block and allow specific sites, control the use of chat clients and other programs, and set daily time limits for Internet use. We experimented with several different profiles and settings and we were impressed with how easy the program was to configure and how effectively it worked. All of Integard's configuration and management tools take place within the user's Web browser, and though it will likely take users a while to get acquainted with where everything is located, the program is fairly intuitive in general. The built-in Help file is relatively brief, but it explains the program's use well enough. Overall, we were quite impressed with Integard Home, and we think it's a great choice for keeping kids safe online, preventing adults from viewing undesirable content, and monitoring online activities.
Integard Home installs and uninstalls without issues. We recommend this program to all users.
Editors' note: This is a review of the full version of Integard Home 2.0.0.9021. The trial version is limited to 30 days trial only.
Publisher's Description
From Race River:
Integard will protect your children from inappropriate Web sites and alert you to suspicious activity that may be cyber bullying or predators. Comprehensive features and reporting lets you control and supervise your children's use of the internet. It supports multiple users with different levels of filtering, links to Windows accounts, supports custom allowed and blocked lists, screenshots, protects your personal information. Integard can give you a one page snapshot of what your kids have been up to on the internet. Integard knows about Google, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and many other Web sites and can give you a report of what they do online. Integard allows you to specify what times of the day the internet can be accessed. Each day of the week can be set to a different time so you can allow more time on weekends. You can also monitor and limit by data usage. Integard can give you a one page snapshot report of what your kids have been doing on the internet. Integard knows about Google, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and can look for signs of depression, cyber bullying and other suspicious activity. Children love to chat online and make new friends. But they don't always know who they are speaking with and can be too quick to trust new contacts. With Integard chat monitoring you can check what was said and Integard will alert you to any suspicious conversations. Integard uses dynamic page analysis and a regularly updated database of known Web sites.
What's new in this version: Version 2.0.0.9047 includes minor bug fixes.
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All versions:
4.0 starsout of 4 votes
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"Clashed with Ad-aware, my antispam software"
Version: Integard Home 2.0.0.9021
Pros
Nothing good
Cons
Could not un install the program. Had to delete by restoring computer to an earlier date. The program said it had mailed the activation/ deletion to my email account, which it didn't. My spyware acutally said program had a trojan for which I deleted
Summary
Too risky.
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"Everything I hoped for and more"
Version: Integard Home 1.4
Pros
Easy to use, small file size, many different features to choose from that I've never seen on any other filtering softwares. I feel completely at ease when any of my children are using the computer.
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"A very useful and powerful yet lightweight bit of software."
Version: Integard Home 1.0.3
Pros
This software has too many great features to describe in this review. I reccomend downloading it and giving it a go yourself. I can mention a few though:
- Does a really good job of blocking and even searching for all those nasty sites that you don't want your kids to see.
- An inbuilt blacklist of sites that are automatically blocked as well as the ability to add additional sites that you wish to allow or block. You can also choose to block everything except for the sites you want to allow. I thought this was particularly good.
- An inbuilt keywords list to prevent searching and displaying pages that contain any of those nasty words plus the ability to add your own keywords that you don't want coming up or being searched.
- A personal information section where you can add your details to stop kids filling in online forms and sending their details over chat programs.
- Ability to set data limits and time limits for individual users.
- Ability to monitor emails and chat.
- Generate reports on web, email and chat usage.
- Great turnaround on support responses if you are having trouble with it.
All in all this is a very powerful little tool that I would reccomend to anyone who would like to keep their kids safe or even just monitor what is happening with your internet connection.
Cons
There were a couple of minor issues in trying to get Integard to work with other software that uses the internet but I contacted the support team and they were very helpful in telling me how to allow several programs and once I knew how to allow them it was very easy to add more.
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"Very easy to install and configure and does a good job."
Version: Integard Home 1.0.3
Pros
Integard has all the functionality you would expect from a product like this without making it complicated to use. The ability to set download limits is a nice feature I havn't seen in the other filters. I also like the browser based admin that lets me access it over the network.
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