My daughter has her own laptop which she has in her bedroom. For safety I use CyberPatrol to restrict her usage of it. However, she’s come across a problem with it, that I believe also affects most other software of this type.

It has time management facilities, where I can stop her from using the PC in the middle of the night. If you wind the system clock backwards it knows tampering has occurred and stops access until it’s resolved. But if you move the clock forward it can’t tell (after all, you could simply have just had the PC turned off during this time). She now knows this and can access the laptop when she shouldn’t.

So, I contacted CyberPatrol to ask them if there was a technical solution to this. There isn’t but they said…

our software cannot replace the most powerful Internet Filter of all, you as the parent or administrator of our software and the computer use in general.

So that’s the get-out clause. They sell software to try and monitor and restrict usage. When it doesn’t work, it’s up to me as I should be keeping an eye on it anyway. So why bother?

Indeed, I won’t. My licence is up soon and I didn’t even bother waiting for the expiry date – last night I uninstalled CyberPatrol and installed (pause for breath) Windows Live OneCare Family Safety. It’s free but doesn’t have the time management functionality but, hey, when it can be so easily over-ridden, what’s the point?

Now, I’m not a network expert in any way shape or form. Therefore when my Nintendo Wii started having network problems last night, I was in a bit of a panic. I also have a wireless streaming MP3-thingy in the living room and that wasn’t working either.

However, I knew my wireless network was working as I’d been tinkering on my daughter’s laptop earlier, which was fine.

Anyway, I kicked off my work laptop which has a wireless connection and that worked fine upstairs, near my wireless router. Taking it downstairs, it kept failing.

I’d heard about NetStumbler and so installed this free software onto my laptop. Upstairs it picked up a number of nearby networks, all on different channels. Moving it downstairs, a load more appears and up-popped someone on the same channel. It wasn’t very strong but never-the-less I thought I’d trying changing my networks channel. I chose 4 as nobody was on this – in fact no-one was either side of it either (i.e. channel 3 or 5 – not sure if this helps but, hey, worth a try).

I now have a solid wireless network again.

Unfortunately, I was on channel 6 because I have a Super-G modem and that channel is required for it to work. By changing channels it means my daughters laptop is now using a standard “G” speed (54mbps) – for her use she won’t notice a difference but when I back up her computer across the network I guess I’ll notice it!

I could always track down the slacker using “my” channel….