Friday, July 3, 2009

Windows Auto Insert Notification, How to Disable it

Auto insert notification is a Windows "feature" that makes music CD's play in your computer automatically, just insert CD and the music starts to play. Convenient if you use your computer as a CD player. I play my CD's on my stereo, it sounds better.
Convenience has a high price. Auto insert notification does more than just start your music player. It also automatically loads and runs programs from the CD, from any flash drives, floppy drives, and USB gadgets. Virus's (Virii?) spread themselves via auto insert notification. The virus merely copies itself to the CD or flash drive, and it gets loaded and executed every time the infected media is inserted into a victim computer. The notorious Sony rootkit spread itself this way. Unless you disable auto insert notification, your computer is vulnerable to virus every time you insert a CD, a flash drive/thumb drive, or a USB gizmo.
Plus, auto insert notification is a CPU hog. When active it can suck up 10-20% of your CPU time. Working on a video capture project some time ago, we found the video dropped frames until we tracked down and killed auto insert notification.
With auto insert notification turned off you do have to click on your CD player program to play a CD. With a CD-Rom you will have to use explorer to launch the "autorun" program in the CD root directory by hand on install CD-Roms. That's the only down side to killing auto insert notification.
To kill auto insert notification on XP you hand patch the registry, using regedit. Regedit.exe comes with Windows and is found in directory c:/windows/system32. If you can't remember that, you can search for it with Explorer. There usually is a regedit and a regedt32, they both work pretty much the same.
Click on regedit and it will open a pair of side by side windows. The left hand window has a tree structure that looks just like the one in Explorer. Open Hkey_Local_Machine\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Cdrom Once you navigate to the CDrom registry "leaf" the right hand window will fill with assorted icons.
Look for one named "Autorun". If it does not exist, you will have to create it. Click on Edit, click on New, click on Key. Make the new key a Dword and name it AutoRun. Capitalize the R just in case Windows cares about case.
In the right hand window right click on the AutoRun key and set it's value to zero.
That's it, you are done, close regedit and you have a faster and more secure XP machine.
You do it this way for XP. It's a good guess that Vista and Win 7 work a little bit different, but they both have auto insert notification and you want to turn it off. A bit of googling should turn up kill instructions for Vista or 7.

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