Along with the latest release of Windows Live Essentials yesterday which has been covered with news about the shiny new Windows Live Movie Maker final, what went unnoticed was also a feature update to Windows Live Family Safety. Today Brandon LeBlanc on the Windows Blog posted about what’s new in the latest Windows Live Family Safety, here’s some of his words, summarised into a few dot points:

• The updated version of Windows Live Family Safety offers deeper integration with Windows resulting in fewer log-in prompts and faster web surfing compared to previous versions of Family Safety while it’s running on the PC.
  
• Windows Live Family Safety uses Windows accounts as the basis for storing settings. Parents are no longer required to have a Windows Live ID for each child who needs their own settings.
  
• Windows Live Family Safety reads the Windows Parental Control (WPC) settings on Windows Vista and Windows 7 enabling parents to retrieve WPC activity reports from any Windows Vista or Windows 7 computer online. These reports include time spent on the computer, browsing history, and games and applications run.
• Windows Live Family Safety takes advantage of the new Windows 7 APIs which allows users to access Windows Live Family Safety directly from the Windows Parental Controls Control Panel in Windows
  

Other great features like Windows Live contact management (on Hotmail, Messenger and Profile/Spaces) are still available, keeping your child safe while surfing Windows Live websites. The new update also let parents to monitor their child’s computer and internet activities much easier with deeper integration into Windows, with  WPC activity reports now available to be accessed online. The reduction of log-in prompts and the need for child’s Windows Live accounts also makes the user experience much better. Overall it’s an useful update for those parents who needs a decent program to monitor their child’s computing activities.

You can get Windows Live Family Safety at http://download.live.com/familysafety