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 could be achieved with a mouse click in the Device Manager, it requires deep surgical intervention in the system:
1. In the Start menu, click on Execute and type in the command line regedit in.
2. Now navigate to the Windows registration to the keys HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Cdrom and double-click on the value in the right-hand pane Autorun.
3. Now enter the following in the line that appears instead of the 1 a simple 0 to deactivate the autostart.
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!
