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Disabling Autorun in Windows XP
CD Autorun can be either a great convenience, or a huge nuisance, depending on the type of media being loaded. For those of you who find the latter to be the case, here's a quick registry edit that will disable Autorun in Windows XP. Keep in mind that editing the registry always carries some amount of risk, and should only be done after appropriate steps to back it up have been taken. Once that is done, just follow these simple steps to disable Autorun.
1. Click on Start, and then Run. You should be presented with a box in which you can enter "regedit" (with no quotes), and then click on Ok. A box label "Registry Editor" should be the result.
2. In the Registry Editor, you should see a list on the left with + signs, used to expand the selected folder. Click on the + next to "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE." Within this folder, there should be an entry called "SYSTEM." Expand "SYSTEM," and then "CurrentControlSet," and finally "Services."
3. Within the "Services" directory, there should be a folder called "Cdrom." Select this folder and look on the right panel for an entry called "Autorun." If it is present, skip to step 4. If not, right click on the white area of the right panel and select "New," and then "DWORD value." Name the the new value "Autorun."
4. Double click on "Autorun" and you should be presented with a small box labeled "Edit DWORD Value." Within this box, change the "Value data:" from 1 to 0 (zero) and click Ok. Alternately, you can change the value from 0 to 1 to enable Autorun.
5. Finally, close the Registry Editor and restart the computer.
Once you've completed these steps, and the computer has been restarted, insert a CD known to be Autorun capable (such as a software installation disk) to ensure that Autorun has been disabled.