How to turn-off AutoPlay feature on Windows

You never know whether or not there is any virus in the flash drive that you borrowed from your friends or in any Cds or DVDs you put in your CD or DVD-ROM. To make sure that our PC is protected from that possibilities we will need an anti-virus program or application. But in this post right now, i’m not going to write about any anti-virus program. What i’m intent to write is about one important thing that’ll affect the safety of our Windows system even the one with anti-virus program installed.

You all should already know about Auto Play feature in your Windows OS, right? Then this would make it easier for me, because i don’t have to write a long paragraph about what Auto Play feature is. I’ll just jump to the point then, because of that feature keep running, everytime you plug your flash drive or close your CD or DVD-ROM windows will always detect and this auto play feature will automatically read any folders and files inside the device ( flash drive and Cds ot DVDs ) and ask you what task would you like to perform to that device. When that happens, if there are any virus in it then your system will be in trouble if you’re not prepared with a powerfull anti-virus program.

Now i will just tell you how to turn that feature off, here is the 3 easy steps:

1. Open the Run Dialog Box, and type gpedit.msc

2. In the Group Policy window, go to directory Administrative Templates | System , then find Turn off Autoplay, double-click on it and then enable it.

3. Put a CD or DVD to check whether the feature is still running or not.

So, that’s it. I hope it’ll be helpful

Simple editing: quicken Startmenu and conservating Swapfile

Actually, i should have told you about this tip in my earlier posts. Mainly because i think most of you already know about it, it is almost a must do things right after you have installed your Windows Operating System. Let’s get to the point then, i don’t know exactly why Microsoft make it this way. What i’m talking about is the MenuShowDelay in the Registry editor, i mean why did they set the value to 2000 (correct me if i’m wrong, because i can’t really remember it) instead of 0, which referring to a period of time delay when we point our mouse pointer through the menus in the Startmenu.

Now, you can change it by accessing to this directory in the Registry Editor: HKEY_CURRENT_USER | Control Panel | Desktop. In the window on the right find MenuShowDelay, double-click on it and then change the value to 0 (zero).

Ok, i’m done with the first tip, now the second tip is not in Regedit, you can close it now. In the second tip, we’ll be editing MSConfig. Here is what it is, when we runs a program it consumes our RAM (Random Access Memory), if we only have a common amount of RAM (256 or 512 MB) installed in our PC we will having a problem when we runs 2 or more programs that highly consumes RAM, at that moment our PC will processing like a slug or even aren’t moving at all some times. And what’s worst is when the system is out of RAM to use, it’ll use our hard drives too, as an information storage or usually called swapfile.

That’s why we need a conservative swapfile, that can help our RAM to runs more program than before. We can do that by tweaking MSConfig :

- click Startmenu / Run , type msconfig in the Run dialog box

- click on the tab SYSTEM.INI

- click on [386enh] under the tab SYSTEM.INI

- click New button that located on the right of the window

- type ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1?

- click OK, done.

Optimize windows, turn off the ‘last accessed’ service on folders

Every time you access your folders, windows will always update the ‘last accessed’ on your folders and all the sub-folders. Not to mention how many folders or sub-folders we have. For faster computer, this is not a problem, but for average or slower one, this simple thing could slower your access through folders and sub-folders. And i’m sure this facility is rarely being used by anyone. So i write this to tell you how to turn that off.

It is actually very easy, you can do it in less than a minute, here you go:

- just open registry window, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE | System | CurrentControlSet | Control | FileSystem

- click on FileSystem, right-click on the area of the right window, choose New, DWORD Value

- rename the ‘New Value #1′ to ‘NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate’, then double-click on it, change the value from zero (0) to one (1)

- click Ok and you’re finish.

If this steps is to straight-forward, and you cannot really understand it, you can check my other post about registry editing here, you could learn about editing registry there, because it’s more specific.

This post is quite short, but i hope it could be useful

Hide your control panel from start menu to protect your settings

How do you feel when you left your friend alone with your PC ? Did you worried about what they’re doing with your PC ?
It’s fine if they just use it to finish their homework, like just using Excel, Word, etc. But what if we don’t realize that what they really do is changing our windows settings ?
It is obvious that they can easily access our control panel from start menu, for just about 2 clicks they can get to ControlPanel window.

To avoid that, let me give you 3 simple and easy steps to make your Control Panel disappear from Start menu, but before that i need to warn you about editing your regedit, before you click here and there, you better backed your reg file, you can save the regedit by using the ‘export’ from the regedit menu, or you can use the system restore that is provided by windows by accessing Startmenu / AllPrograms / Accessories / SystemTools / SystemRestore, after you have the back-up reg file, or the system restored you are save to edit your registry :

1. Open the ‘Run dialog box’ from your Start menu, you can do it by clicking the Start button and then click on the ‘Run…’ menu, or you can also do it by click and hold the windows logo on the keyboard and then press ‘R’ ( +R ), in the Run dialog box type ‘regedit’ then click ‘Ok’.

2. In the Registry Editor window, from the folder tree, go to ‘HKEY_CURRENT_USER | Software | Microsoft | Windows | CurrentVersion | Policies | Explorer’, make sure you click on the folder ‘explorer’, then in the explorer window on the right of the folder tree just right-click on the area and choose New DWORD Value in the name of ‘NoControlPanel’, you have to type it carefully exactly like mine, check the capital letter, after the DWORD is added, double-click on it and a little window will appear, now change the value data from zero(0) to one(1) and then click ‘Ok’, you can close the Regedit window.

3. Now that you’re done, you wanna check whether your Control Panel are still on the Start menu or not, but if you do that right after you close your Regedit window i’m very sure that your Control Panel still staring at you from the Start menu. You wanna know why? i’ll tell you, it’s because the explorer needs to be restarted first.

There are three ways to restart your explorer, first is the easiest but take the longest time, just restart your PC, second is same as easy but takes less time, log off your PC and then log in again.
The last way need a little concentration, but it is the fastest, here is the steps:
- Open Windows Task Manager, go to Processes tab and find explorer.exe, after you’ve found it right-click on it and then choose End Proccess, but don’t close your Task manager quite yet.
- Now your taskbar will disappear and all you need to do next is to bring it back, and you can do it by going to the Applications tab in the Task Manager find New Task under it then click it, a small box will appear, type ‘explorer’ and click ‘Ok’, that’s it your taskbar will come back.

The last thing i should tell you is how to make the Control Panel access back to Startmenu, it is very easy indeed, all you need to do is go back to regedit, in step 2 above, i told you to change the value data of ‘NoControlPanel’ from zero(0) to one(1), this is the explanation: one(1) means disappear, and zero(0) will obviously means that it will not disappear, very easy right?

I really hope this information can be useful for you or anyone else.

Update your XP MSConfig

I know most of XP users don’t even care about their MSConfig or maybe they don’t even use it at all. But, information will never hurt, right? Now let me just give you the link and a little description about the update :

It will change your MSConfig setting window from this :

to this:

With the ‘Tools’ tab we can easily access all the thirteen Windows XP tools that available in our harddisk, like Registry editor, programs, command prompt, etc.

Now that you know what the update is for, just decide whether you need it or not, the links are just below:

first, you can download from the original source : microsoft.com if you are sure that you can pass the Windows XP validation, cause it requires that before you download the update.

But if you want an instant download, i also have the link : 9down.com