Tip of the Day: HowTo Disable AutoPlay in Windows XP (works on removable drives)

[mouser]

Do you hate AutoPlay? I Do.

This little tip will show you how to turn it off.

AutoPlay is one of those things that tries to be smart and figure out what to do when you insert a cd or removable drive.  It will scan the drive (or cd) and run whatever installer is on the cd, or if its a removable usb drive it will pop up a dialog and start scanning the drive to try to guess what you might want to do with the drive.  Guess what? It's my drive, I think I know what i want to do with it thank you very much.  If i want a clippy artificial intelligence on my computer i'll install this.

Ok so if you want to disable autoplay for all or just some drives (or just removable drives), go to theMicrosoft PowerToys for Windows XP Web Page, and find the download for TweakUI on the bottom right.

Once TweakUI is installed, run it and go to the "My Computer -> AutoPlay" section, and there you go, just disable what you dont want, or re-enable it as you wish.

ps.
If you have the opposite problem - you lost your AutoPlay and TweakUI wont fix it for you, try this Microsoft AutoPlay fixer tool.

[jgpaiva]

Good idea!!
This is most anoying when you have a 250gb external usb disk filled with stuff, and the stupid OS thinks it is a usb drive and takes 2 minutes to check it all for media.
Now following your advice on using teakui

[lanux128]

cool info, mouser.
btw, this can also be done without TweakUI, by going to 'My Computer' then right-click & selecting the 'Properties'. here we can enable/disable auto-play based on the drive and its contents..

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[mouser]

yep, good point lanux, but this never seems to work for me on my pc with removeable drives, that's why i had to find the tweakui method.

[lanux128]

yes, i understand, mouser. my info was more like method B, if A wasn't available.. ;-)

[MerleOne]

I have a problem close to the one with autoplay, also regarding removable drives : I don't want to activate system restore on a set of removables USB drives that always have letter P: and Q: when mounted on my XP Home.  But quite regularly I have to deactivate system restore on them, as if the settings were gone.  The same setting remains stable for non removable drives.

Is there a way, once and for all, to disable system restore for these removable drives.  I don't think TweakUI allows this (it didn't on my old Win98SE system, and caused quite a few other problems...)

Thanks.

[direnc]

Another method to stop autoplay: http://www.llbbl.com/2006/06/13/how-to-disable-autoplay/ it worked really well for me.