Well it is Sunday morning again and fresh snow is on the ground. Ho hum more snow, when will it stop? How about taking some time this morning to learn how to disable autoplay on windows? Have I got your attention yet? Remember way back when, when the whole world was using floppy disks to share information? Remember how many viruses were spread by sharing the disks? In today’s computing world everyone is still sharing files, the difference is we are all using USB flash drives to share the information.

When you insert a USB flash drive or a CD/DVD into your system a feature called autoplay will launch and ask you what you would like to do next as illustrated in the diagram below.

In order to disable autoplay on windows do the following:

XP Professional Users:

• Click Start then click on Run in the run box type gpedit.msc and then click Ok. When the group policy window opens double click Administrative Templates in the left portion of the window.
• In the right window pane double click on System scroll down the tree and double click on Turn Off Autoplay.
• In the Turn Off Autoplay Properties Sheet window, select Enabled. From the dropdown list next to Turn Off Autoplay on, click All drives and then click OK. Exit the group policy editor and you are done.

Windows XP Home Edition Users:

• Click Start and then click Run in the run box type regedit and then click Ok.
• Navigate to the following location in the registry:
• HKEY_CURRENT_USER|Software|Microsoft|Windows|CurrentVersion|Policies|Explorer
• Click on Explorer then in the right window pane right click on NoDriveTypeAutoRun and then on the drop down menu select modify type in b5 and click Ok. That’s it you are done.

Ok, now that we have successfully disabled autoplay on windows we still need to learn how to disable autorun on windows. Why should I disable autorun on windows? Autorun can launch viruses and malware from USB flash drives and CD/DVD’s even if autoplay is disabled. Go here to learn how to disable autorun on windows.

Happy Computing! Peace.