Disabling auto play

You might be facing problem with the auto play feature in windows, especially with pen drives (USB Drives). Because unlike CDs, viruses can copy themselves easily into pen drives, so I disabled the autoplay feature. If you want to do the same thing follow these steps.

• Goto Run dialog box, type regedit and hit enter.
• be careful when changing registry, because it might corrupt your system if done wrong. You might choose to take backup, so that you can revert back to your previous settings if anything goes wrong.
• Navigate to the following key
  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\
  CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer

• Create NoDriveTypeAutoRun key, if it is not there.
• If it there, set its value as FF, this disables auto play on all drives.
• If you have to create this key,
  
• right click in the right pane, select new > DWORD value
• name it as 'NoDriveTypeAutoRun', and set its value to FF.
• Thats it, you have disabled auto play for all drives.

But even after doing this, don't double click on your pen drives. Because by doing so, you will run the viruses in your pen drive if there are any. Always do right click on pen drives and select right click or open in explorer, select pen drive in left pane to open it.

Update: If you don't want to change the registry manually, download Disable_Auto_Play, unzip it to get registry file. Double click on it, it will ask for the confirmation, click on yes. It will add the key to the registry.

See here for more information.

Even you can do this by using group policy editor. Go to Windows > Run > gpEdit.msc
Go to User Configuration > Administrative Templates > System > Turn Off Autoplay.
Enable it and select the option "All drives" in the below pane.

Read more:
Task Manager Disabled?
Access to Registry Disabled?
Important steps when cleaning virus
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