We bought the computer last Christmas: a Pentium II, 64 megabytes of memory, a 56K modem, Windows 98, the printer, and a stack of CD-ROMs. By New Year's Day the desktop was covered in icons nobody recognized, my 13-year-old had changed the wallpaper to a picture of a boy band, my 10-year-old had "accidentally" deleted his sister's book report, and my 7-year-old had figured out how to get to a chat room. I am not a computer person. I am a mom with a library card and a certain amount of stubbornness, and I decided that if this machine was going to live in my house it was going to live by my rules.

Nine months later it works. This page is everything I figured out, mostly by reading the manual, calling my brother-in-law, and making mistakes. If it helps one other family avoid the Great Book Report Disaster of January 1999, it was worth typing.

The kids are Jessica (13), Tommy (10) and Katie (7). My husband is Mark and he is in charge of the printer, which is a full-time job.

Not in a bedroom. Not in the basement. It's on a desk in the corner of the family room, where the screen faces into the room, and anybody walking through can see what's on it. This was the single best decision we made and it took no money and no software. It's not about spying on my kids. It's that a 10-year-old in a chat room at 11 p.m. with the door shut is a different 10-year-old than one sitting six feet from his mother while she folds laundry. Everybody behaves a little better in public, including me.

If you already put it in a kid's bedroom, I'm sorry, but I'd move it. It'll be a fight for a week and then it won't be.

Windows 98 can give each person in the family their own "user profile": their own desktop, their own wallpaper, their own Start menu, their own Favorites in the browser, and their own My Documents folder. This is how you stop the boy band wallpaper from being everyone's wallpaper, and how you stop Tommy from deleting Jessica's book report, because he can't even see it.

How to set it up: Start → Settings → Control Panel → Users. Click "New User" and it walks you through it: a name, a password, and a list of checkboxes for what that person gets to have their own copy of (I checked everything, including My Documents). Do it once for each kid and once for each grown-up. From then on, when the computer starts up it asks who you are.

Two honest warnings. First, this is not a lock. Windows 98 will let anyone who hits Cancel at the login box straight into the computer with a plain default desktop, and a determined kid can find another kid's files if he goes looking. Think of the profiles as coat hooks with names on them, not as safes. It keeps honest kids organized; it doesn't keep out a snoop. Second, the grown-up password is the grown-up password. Don't write it on a sticky note on the monitor, which I did, for a month.

What it did fix, completely: nobody's homework is in anybody else's folder, nobody can mess up anybody else's desktop, and when Katie starts the computer she sees her three games and nothing else, which is exactly right for seven.

We're on AOL like half the country, and the parental controls are the reason I'm still on it. Here's how they work, in general, because they change the screens around a little with every version and I'm on 4.0.

• Your account gets several screen names (we have five). The first one is the master screen name, and that's the grown-up. Only the master screen name can change the controls. Do not let a child use the master screen name, ever, for anything. Make yourself a second everyday name if you want one.
• Each kid gets their own screen name, and for each one you pick an age category: Kids Only (12 and under), Young Teen (13 to 15), Mature Teen (16 and 17) or general access for adults. The category decides what that screen name can get to: which parts of the service, which chat rooms, whether they can get to the Web at all, and what kind of Web sites. Kids Only is very locked down; it's a kids' area with kids' stuff and that's it.
• Beyond the category, there are custom controls for each screen name: Web access, chat, instant messages, e-mail (you can block e-mail from anyone not on a list you approve, which for Katie is a list of two grandmothers), newsgroups, and downloading files. Turn off what you don't want. You can always turn it back on when they're older.
• Katie is Kids Only, no e-mail except Grandma and Grandma, no chat. Tommy is Kids Only with e-mail to a list. Jessica is Young Teen with instant messages on (that took negotiating) and chat off (that did not). She'll get more when she's 16. I've told her so, and I've told her the controls are because it's the Internet, not because it's her.

The controls aren't magic. They are a fence, not a wall, and a fence plus the family-room rule plus a parent who wanders past is about as good as it gets. Don't set them and forget them; go look at them once a month. Once, in April, I found that "somebody" had figured out that Mom's password was the dog's name.

Typed up, printed out, taped to the side of the monitor. Everybody signed it, including Mark.

The timer is the part people laugh at, and the timer is the part that works. A kitchen timer doesn't argue. It's also cheaper than any program.

Jessica and Tommy do their reports in the word processor that came with the computer. Katie mostly plays the reading games. Some things we learned:

• The encyclopedia on the CD-ROM is wonderful, and it is not the whole world. The teachers can tell when a report is three paragraphs copied out of the CD, and so can I. Our rule is: the CD is where you start, the library is where you go next, and you write it in your own words. Cite your sources, including the CD.
• Save every five minutes. We've had the power go out mid-paragraph. Save early, save often, and give the file a name you can find again ("Tommy Book Report Sept 99" and not "Document3").
• Print a draft and read it on paper. Spell check is not proofreading. It thinks "their" is fine when you meant "there." Jessica learned that on a report grade.
• The printer is a shared resource. Don't print thirty pages of pictures of dolphins at 10 p.m. the night before the report is due, because that's when the ink runs out. (See above: Mark's full-time job.)
• Typing. The kids type faster than I do already. Tommy learned with a typing program with a race car in it. I recommend the race car.

Back up school papers to floppies!

This is the Great Book Report Disaster section. In January, Tommy deleted Jessica's book report. The Recycle Bin had been emptied. The report was due the next morning. There was crying, some of it mine. She retyped it from her rough draft until midnight.

Now every kid has their own box of floppy disks, labeled with their name and the school year, and when a paper is done it gets saved to the hard disk and to the floppy. A floppy holds 1.44 megabytes, which is dozens of reports. They cost almost nothing by the box. Every couple of weeks I make a second copy of everybody's disks and those go in the drawer in the kitchen. Label them with a marker; a stack of unlabeled disks is just a stack of plastic.

Floppies do go bad, especially the ones that ride around in a backpack. That's why there are two copies. If a disk starts giving errors, copy what you can off it and throw it away; don't trust it again.

I also keep a folder of the printouts. Paper still works when the computer doesn't.

A virus is a program somebody wrote to spread itself from computer to computer, and some of them do damage on the way. In 1999 they mostly get around three ways:

• E-mail attachments. You get a message, it has a file attached, you open the file, the file is the virus. The big one this past March came as a Word document attached to an e-mail that looked like it was from someone you knew, and when you opened it, it mailed itself to the first fifty people in your address book. A whole lot of company e-mail systems got clogged up for days. The rule in our house: nobody opens an attachment without asking, even if it's from Grandma, because Grandma might have the virus too.
• Word and Excel documents with "macros." A macro is a little program that can live inside a document. Most of the viruses going around the last few years are macro viruses, and they spread on floppies and attachments. When the word processor asks whether you want to enable macros in a document you didn't make, the answer is no.
• Floppies from school, and downloads. The school computers have everything under the sun on them. Tommy's disk came home with a virus in March. That's why the "scan it first" rule.

What we do: we bought an anti-virus program and it runs all the time. Once a month I sign on and download the new virus definitions, because a virus program that doesn't know about this month's viruses can't catch them; the program reminds me. It scans every floppy when you put it in. It scans the e-mail attachments. And the house rule handles the rest. We haven't had one since March.

One more thing: chain e-mails that say "WARNING! Forward this to everyone you know or a virus will destroy your computer!" are almost always fake and are a kind of virus themselves, made of people. Don't forward them. If you're worried, ask somebody who knows, or check the anti-virus company's information.

I sat each of the kids down separately and we went through it. Here's what I told them, and I'll tell it to you the same way.

• People online are strangers, even the nice ones, even after weeks of talking. A grown-up can type "I'm 12" as easily as a 12-year-old can.
• Your screen name should not be your real name. Not first-and-last, not your school, not your town, not your birth year. "Jessica1986" tells a stranger three things.
• Never type your last name, your address, your phone number, your school's name, or your parents' names into a chat room, a message, a Web site, or a "profile." Never send a picture. If a Web site wants that information to give you a prize, the prize isn't worth it.
• Never agree to meet somebody from online, and never call somebody from online, and if somebody sends you something that makes you feel weird or scared, don't answer it; come get me. You will never be in trouble for coming to get me.
• What you type can be saved and printed by anyone who sees it. Don't say anything online you wouldn't say in the school cafeteria with a teacher standing there.

And for the parents: the AOL profile is where kids put everything they've been told not to. Go read your kid's profile. Then go read your own.

Nobody warned me about this: when the computer is online, the phone is busy. One line, one thing at a time. My mother called for two hours one Sunday and got a busy signal and was sure we'd all been killed. Some families get a second line just for the computer; we decided it wasn't worth another bill, and instead:

• You ask before you sign on, and you say how long.
• Nobody's online during dinner or after 9 on a school night, so Grandma knows when to call.
• If you have call waiting, an incoming call will knock the modem off the line, right in the middle of whatever you were doing. There's a setting in the dial-up connection to turn call waiting off while you're online; the modem dials a code (ours is *70) before the number. Your phone company can tell you the code. This one took me a while to figure out and it fixed a lot of arguments.

The kids are lobbying for a second line. The kids are welcome to pay for it.

• Sunday night, after the kids are in bed, I run ScanDisk and then Disk Defragmenter (they're under Accessories → System Tools). Takes an hour and the computer seems happier. Also, I check Windows Update for anything new.
• The screen saver is not a security feature, but a password on it does stop a 7-year-old from wandering into her sister's login when her sister walks away for a minute.
• Keep the CD-ROMs in their cases and the cases in one box. We've lost two games to the underside of the couch.
• Write down what you paid for the computer, the serial number, and the date, and keep it with the manuals. Keep the manuals.
• Learn to do it yourself. I didn't know what a Control Panel was in January. It's September. You can too.

Other pages I've found useful: Brian's PC Help Page (when it's actually broken) · The Working Mom's Notebook · The Study Skills Page (for Jessica) · The Y2K Watch (calm, and I needed calm) · Mrs. Bell's Kindergarten Class · The SiliconValley neighborhood