Here's a look at both methods, as well as how to actually make your own USB security key using an old thumb drive. How to create a USB security key on Windows 10. Put the USB stick into your Pc USB slot. Click on the Install icon on your desktop - it will then have a box appear asking you to name the USB drive letter. Put the drive letter in the box and click on install.
I'm using a Limited User account under Windows XP, and I'm having a bit of trouble getting my Adaptoid (the most coveted N64 controller - USB adapter, because of it's support for sending raw N64 controller commands + the fact that it's been discontinued) to work smoothly: as installed, the included software requires Administrator privileges to load the driver. Presumably, it is possible to arrange for the driver to be loaded automatically when the Adaptoid is inserted by adding some stuff to the INF file for the driver : the question is, what stuff?
(It would also suit me just as well if the driver could be automatically loaded when anything attempted to open Device WishNA1, or even to have it automatically loaded at every boot, really, but doing it on insertion seems like the right way.) Note: I do have access to an administrative account, it's just that I prefer not to have to use it day-to-day. First of all, let's clarify that a USB device has a Plug & Play driver on Windows 2000 and higher, so services start modes are irrelevant. The driver will have an entry as a 'service' in the registry, but its start mode is irrelevant here. Let's split the problem into two parts:. Installing driver for the device: This requires administrative privileges. This happens when you insert a USB device into a port for the first time. Windows goes over your.INF files to find one that matches your hardware.
If the driver is WHQL-certified, it'll load automatically. Otherwise, you'd see the dreaded Add New Hardware wizard. If you're running as admin, a few clicks on Next should be enough to install it.
Otherwise, better have that Administrator password ready. Loading the driver for the device: Once the device is installed, the driver will be loaded each time this device is inserted into this USB port without requiring any additional user intervention. Ever noticed how a USB printer, camera or disk drive load much faster the second time you plug it in? That's because that's just loading, without installing. From looking at the.INF, it looks valid. Also, it's not WHQL-certified, so you'd have to install it manually.
I'm assuming when you insert the Adaptoid, you get an Add New Hardware wizard. If you point it manually to the installation directory, does the Adaptoid install and function?
Does it appear in the Device Manager? USB devices which have a serial number are an exception.
They're installed once for all USB ports. Those devices are rather uncommon, though.
Advertisement Imagine having a USB stick with all of your favorite apps on it. Maybe a collection of PC troubleshooting utilities if you’re an IT tech, or maybe an assortment of spreadsheet and word processing tools if you’re an executive road warrior. Wouldn’t it be pretty sweet if you could just walk up to any computer, put your USB memory card into the USB port, and have your favorite portable apps automatically launch without any effort on your part?
Over the years, system administrators have come up with various tricks to accomplish this task. Tim wrote about a few useful ways that people use to launch various jobs, and Varun covered a series of useful that can come in handy. In this article, I’m going to cover a few USB auto-launch techniques that administrators have used. You might have been told that it’s impossible to auto-launch applications on your USB card on your Windows 7 computer.
I’m here to show you that it is not true. How You Used to Auto-Launch USB Apps For years, at least since Windows 2000, but probably even earlier, system administrators have used the autorun.inf technique to autostart applications on a USB memory stick just like the autorun feature worked on computer CDs. The autorun.inf file could be as complicated or as simple as you liked.
The simplest form was as follows: autorun icon=mypic.ico open=start-zim.bat action=Click “OK” to start your apps! All you would need is the icon image and the batch job available, and the moment you inserted your USB stick into a computer running an OS like Windows XP, you would see the following options automatically pop up.
Just click OK and you’re good to go. You can launch a batch job that starts all of the apps that you want, and you essentially have a customized way to open up all of your apps in an automated way that saves a lot of time.
This was somewhat limiting, because you had that pop-up prompt. I’ve heard that there were ways to get around the pop-up that involved a little bit of tweaking/hacking, but in doing so you introduce the ability to hack any computer with some virus simply by inserting a USB stick. Microsoft caught on to this in Windows 7 and completely disabled the USB functionality of autorun.inf in that operating system. Future updates of Windows XP also disabled that feature. So what’s a system admin to do? Launching Apps Automatically From Your USB Stick Well, where there’s a will there’s a way.
And yes, there is a way to launch a program just by inserting your USB stick into a Windows 7 PC. The first thing you’re going to want to do is install, which Guy covered a while back. AutoIT is a very cool scripting language that lets you compile those scripts into exec programs that you can distribute to any PC. The download includes an editor as well as the converter software.
The great thing about AutoIT scripts is that there are lots of brilliant people out there creating scripts for a long list of tasks. The following script is what you use to detect whether a USB stick has been inserted into a port. $DBTDEVICEARRIVAL = '0x00008000' $WMDEVICECHANGE = 0x0219 GUICreate(') GUIRegisterMsg($WMDEVICECHANGE, 'MyFunc') Func MyFunc($hWndGUI, $MsgID, $WParam, $LParam) If $WParam $DBTDEVICEARRIVAL Then MsgBox(4096, 'Info', 'My Drive has been Inserted, Backup My Files!' ) EndIf EndFunc While 1 $GuiMsg = GUIGetMsg WEnd That script will recognize a “device change”, and for a USB stick it will launch a message box, as shown here. Now, think about that. If this script will recognize a USB stick in order to launch a message, then it can be slightly modified to launch a program instead.
So, in order to do this, I took the script above and replaced the MsgBox command with the following line. Run ('F: System Apps ZimWiki Zim Desktop Wiki start-zim.cmd') What this does is senses when I’ve plugged in my USB stick, and then automatically launches the Zim Wiki app I have on my USB stick that I use to organize and monitor my writing work. Now we have a way to auto-launch a program just by inserting the USB stick.
However, let’s take it a step further and launch a whole collection of apps by launching a batch job on your USB card called startapps.bat that launches all the programs you want for that particular stick. START - F: System Apps ZimWiki ZimDesktopWiki start-zim.cmd START - C: Users Owner MUOSTORYIDEAS MUOSTORYIDEAS.txt START - FIREFOX.EXE //www.makeuseof.com/wp-admin What’s the point of this?
The point is that now you can have a unique “ startapps.bat” script for various USB sticks. One might be for your school work, in which case you’d open your class webpage, a word processor and maybe a spreadsheet for the class. Another might be for your work as a help desk tech, where it would auto-launch PC support utilities and your favorite tech website (MUO of course). The only catch is this – the EXE file you create with the AutoIT script has to be running on every PC that you want the auto-launch to occur on. This satisfies the Windows 7 security demands. Just open the AutoIT script above, and compile and build the script to create your EXE file. Put that EXE in the Startup folder of the computers you use most often.
If the script is running, you’ll see the following Icon in the task bar. This setup is great because there’s no prompt at all – just insert your USB stick and all of your required apps will just launch automatically. Give the script a try and see if you can get this setup working with your own USB stick. Do you like this approach? Any tips for how to improve it? Share your insight in the comments section below.