Quick overview:
A game, an office application or a DVD movie - they all have one feature that is usually annoying for the user: they start automatically after you have inserted the little silver discs into the drive. But if you only need a few files from the CD, it is more than annoying to wait for the welcome screen or the installation program to load each time. It would therefore be very effective to switch off this autostart for CDs and DVDs completely, but this is not exactly easy under Windows 2000. Whereas with Windows 98/Me this was still achieved with a mouse click in the Device Manager, you have to carry out deep surgical procedures on the system:
1. Click Run in the Start menu and type regedit in the command line.
2. Now navigate to the Windows registry to the keys HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Cdrom and double-click on the value Autorun in the right pane.
3. Now enter a simple 0 instead of 1 in the line that appears so that the autostart is deactivated.
NOTE FOR NEW PUBLICATION: This article was produced by Sandro Villinger and comes from the Windows Tweaks archive, which has been built up since the late 1990s.
On Windows Tweaks you will find time-saving tech guides for PC, software & Microsoft. For a stress-free digital everyday life. Already we have been "tweaking" Windows since 1998 and just won't stop!
