Cyber Patrol has been around for a while and has developed a loyal following of parents who want to protect their children from inappropriate content and school administrators who need to filter Internet content for the students in their classrooms.

This is definitely a product whose main strength is its filtering and blocking capabilities - not its ability to monitor communications. For this reason, we mostly recommend it for parents with very young children (under 7 years old). It is not recommended for employers or anyone who wishes to monitor multiple computers.

We had a few hiccups to start when we began our testing procedures.

Installing the software was a bit clunky and we had some strange issues with unprompted reboots that made the process somewhat frustrating. We were unable to reproduce it consistently, however, so it only seems to happen on some installation attempts.

Once the software was successfully installed, it did a fairly good job of blocking URLs. A lot of newer websites with adult content slipped through while older websites were successfully blocked.

There was a recurring complaint that showed up consistently in our testing data, however. Almost all of our testers reported extreme difficulty in being able to surf properly when Cyber Patrol was trying to filter the Internet. There were many sites that were blocked for no apparent reason. We actually visted the blocked sites from another computer and in many cases we could not for the life of us figure out why the website was blocked.

As you can imagine, this can cause a lot of frustration, even for a child trying to do their homework. For this reason, we really think that Cyber Patrol should only be used on a computer that is used only by the little ones (to avoid parents getting frustrated when they try to surf the web).