Disable CD Rom Drives

As Promised we have created two more free utlities. The first one is our CD Rom disabler. It allows you to enable or disable CD Rom devices on any Windows 2000/XP/2003 machines

You can download it from our downloads section

For those of you who want to remotely disable or enable CD rom devices on your network we have created the remote cdrom disabler:

Also, if you did not already know we have created free utilities that will do the same for floppy, and USB flash drives. Just check out our Downloads page and you will find a ton of free downloads

Posted By: Steve Wiseman on Thursday, July 13, 2006

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Disable Floppy Drives - Remotely

Yesterday we had a nice article about disabling your floppy drive. We just released another application along that same vein. Remote Floppy Disabler. It is a good companion to our USB disabler, and Remote USB Disabler programs.
Just like all of the previous utilities it does not require any install, DLL, or .net runtimes.

Download it free from our Downloads section - As always...only freeware goodness. No spyware or adware.

Posted By: Steve Wiseman on Tuesday, July 11, 2006

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Disable Floppy Drives

We had a popular article a while back on disabling USB drives. We have had a request for doing the same with floppy drives.

There is a simple registry change that will keep the floppy drivers from starting when the system boots. If you want to change it yourself

As always - back your system up before messing around in the registry.

Just open regedit and browse to this key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Flpydisk

Notice the value 'Start'

Switch this value to 4, and floppy drives are disabled.

Switch this value to 3, and floppy drives are enabled.

For those of you that don't feel like messing around in the registry -

We wrote a program to do it for you:

You can find it in our downloads section

One final note - stay tuned. We will release another version of this tool soon (Free of course) That will let you remotely disable, or enable floppy drives on your network.

Posted By: Steve Wiseman on Monday, July 10, 2006

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Why Windows takes so long to shut down.

We all have been there. It is 4:55 and you want to get out of work...But you want to make sure your system is shutdown for the night. You dutifully close all of your applications and start shutting down

5 minutes later it *finally* powers off

It happens to more machines that it should. I decided to see what the problem might be. I searched google, forums, and newsgroups for an answer. The biggest culprit is a problem unloading the current users profile.

This can happen when third party, or even Microsoft applications have not properly cleaned up when exiting. Windows will keep trying to unload the profile until Windows finally decides that it can't and should shutdown. Even if you find the application causing the problem - it may be impossible to do anything about it.

This is why Microsoft released the User Profile Hive Cleanup Service

This free utility automatically cleans up user profiles and prevents you from playing the timeout wait game.

Once you run the setup wizard it will look like the installer did nothing. If you open up your services list (Click start, then run and type services.msc now click ok), you will see that a new service is running in the background:

The idea of this program is to reclaim resources when a task is finished (memory, handles, etc). It accomplishes this by monitoring for users to log off and verifying that unused resources are reclaimed. This approach is superior as it works for any known reason that profiles do not unload and also will keep working to address new unknown issues.

Now when you go to shutdown, logoff or restart it will happen within seconds. Instead of minutes.

Posted By: Steve Wiseman on Monday, July 03, 2006

Check out our utilities for windows