How to block USB devices in Windows XP


The most important thing for any one who owns a Computer or laptop is their DATA. This data or iinformation or whatever it may be will sometimes contains private items and also some confidential items. But these days the data can be easily copied by the pen drives or USB drives. This is mianly happening just because we will be a little careless about the security of this data. Also the PC will be vulnerable to viruses as USB’s contain them the most.

So in order to prevent this data theft we have something which doesn’t require any software installations. We will block or restrict the USB drives in our Computer so that it doesn’t work and this involves a small registry hack. I was going through some registry hacking books and came to know about this trick. In order to do this

  1. First Go to Start -> Run then type Regedit and ENTER.
  2. You will see a window which is called Registry Editor.
  3. In that window Go to Hkey_Local_Machine\System\CurrentControlset\Services\USBStor
  4. In the right pane, look for value Start and have value as 0000000(3)
  5. Double click on that and change that value to 4.

The effect can be seen after a reboot of your system. This is very useful trick to make your data safe and secure. If you want to unlock the drives you can always do it by changing the value again to 3.
Have a safe PC..!!


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Filed under: Tips n Tricks,Windows XP

January 6, 2008 by: Prasanth Chandra

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