Block USB Devices in XP

Posted by Srijit at 12:08 AM

All students in our college received our laptops few weeks back, and the biggest problem we face that everybody seems to take everybody's data. As nobody is well versed of using laptops, and they are a bit careless about their data security. Pen drives becoming a handy tool to get data is the biggest problem we all face today. Not only in our college, it is part of everybody's life that. To this what can be done is that the USB can be blocked and then stopping the use of USB drives. Here is a simple registry hack to do so, try it with care. :)

  1. Go to Start –> Run, type Regedit.
  2. Go to Hkey_Local_Machine\System\CurrentControlset\Services\USBStor
  3. In the right pane, look for value Start and have value as 0000000(3)
  4. Double click on that and change that value to 4.
You might be required to restart the PC, and then you are done with it, USB is now blocked.
In case if you want to get the USB unblocked, just change the value again to 3.
See, its so easy. Isn't it ;)