Disabling Autorun

One big cause for your computer getting infected by viruses, worms, and other malware would be Window’s autorun “feature”. Plug in a hard disk, optical disk, memory card, etc and autorun launches and runs a program. Guess what that program usually is? Yup, malware.

So one of the easiest ways to protect your computer is to simply disable autorun. There are many ways to do it but by far, this procedure from annoyances.org works best for me:

1. Click Start->Run…
2. Type “regedit” and press Enter.
3. Navigate the tree on the left pane to “My Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\policies”
4. Expand “policies”
5. If there’s no “Explorer” folder, right-click “policy” and select New->Key. Type “Explorer” and press Enter.
6. Open the “Explorer” folder.
7. If there’s no “NoDriveTypeAutoRun” entry on the right pane, right-click on it and select New->DWORD Value. Type “NoDriveTypeAutoRun” and press Enter.
8. Right click on “NoDriveTypeAutoRun” and select Modify
9. Enter “ff” on the Value Data Field and select Hexadecimal for Base. Click OK
10. Close Regedit
11. As with anything you do in Windows, restart your computer.

Voila! No more autorun.