Rubbermaid Factory Outlet

Managing USB Pendrives

Pen drive or USB drives are increasingly used. Its use is often a necessity, but sometimes we can bring security issues, or be against company policy. Whatever the reason, they become a problem when doing an effective control over them, and to disable the USB ports is not the best solution. Some modern PCs have no PS2 ports for keyboard and mouse which also require USB ports, like printers, speakers and scanners.

For Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista and Windows 7 there are two registry keys that can help.

disable writing to USB Pendrive

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \\ SYSTEM \\ CurrentControlSet \\ Control \\ StorageDevicePolicies

The DWORD "WriteProtect" should be 1. If we put it to 0 to enable it again.

To disable the USB stick completely

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \\ SYSTEM \\ CurrentControlSet \\ Services \\ USBSTOR

dword "Start" should be at 4. With 3-enable it again.

As both keys will apply on "Local Machine" which makes it a value and not by computer users. We must not forget this important point because although we can not computer administrators use the USB stick if we're in a team with these modified values. Similarly, a user can use any USB stick without problem on a computer that has not changed these values.