Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Autorun problem !!

Well, this is a very common problem with many people. School or college students who share their pendrives or external storage media on public computers tend to gather a lot of viruses/worms from these machines. On using these pendrives or external storage media on their personal computers, they risk infecting them with these infections.

These days most of the viruses and other infections spread through a feature called 'autorun' present on the windows platforms that Microsoft has originally put for user's convenience.
This autorun thing works by putting a small file called autorun.inf onto the external media which can be configured to autostart a particular program as soon as the media is inserted into the computer.

Now, though this was meant to be an advantageous feature for windows users, virus makers have used this effectivelty to spread their warez by making their affected warez autorun and start executing as soon as one connects the device, sometimes without even the knowledge of the user.

So, ill tell you some of the best and shortest methods to stop this risky feature to run automatically :
1) Simplest thing would be to keep SHIFT key pressed when inserting the external media and until the media has been detected[can be checked by looking on My Computer window whether a new drive for the media has been connected].

2) For lazybones or people who keep forgetting to do the above procedure[like me :P], u can download the registry file given at the end of this post, double click it on select ok.

There are several third party softwares doing this work too but one should try and avoid them since faster options are available as mentioned above. In case people still need to know about them, I shall mention them in a later post.

Have a virus free world :)

Download the registry file by clicking the links below:
link 1

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Well said.

Post a Comment

Please post your comments on whether you liked it and what else would you like me to write on. Suggestions of all types are welcome.