Detroit Stops Auto Crashes by Disabling Ignition

Imagine that headline with the story: "To make our customers safer and help to prevent collisions, we've disabled the ignition system in all 2011 models of our cars.  If they can't start them, they can't wreck them."

Silly isn't it?

Except that Microsoft has applied this "logic" to Windows 7.

Years ago, Microsoft introduced a feature called autorun.inf.  Being a simple little text file, Windows would look at it when a CD, DVD or USB drive was connected, and would then start the program specified in the file.  Think of it as an autoexec.bat file for removable media.

That little file is what enables a menu to pop up when you insert a software CD into your computer.  In the case of one of my USB "thumb" drives, it starts up a menu from portableapps.com giving me access to portable versions of Firefox, Thunderbird, TotalCommander, LogMeIn Ignition and more.

Except that I couldn't get it to work in Windows 7.

According to the Microsoft Developer web site, it is disabled for USB drives in Windows 7.  After some Googling, I found that their reasoning is as follows:

Autorun.inf may be set to start a program infected by a virus.  So if your USB stick is used in an infected machine, automatically starting a program when inserted into another machine will spread the virus.  So by preventing Windows from using the autorun.inf file, they've slowed the spread of viruses.

Of course, they've also at the same time removed a major portion of the functionality of USB drives at the same time.

Note: optical drives (CD-ROM and DVD-ROM) don't have this limitation.

This isn't a BIG hassle for me, I insert the drive, tell the Windows popup to browse the drive, then double click on the startportableapps.exe icon.  It is just an example of making life more difficult as one of the penalties for using Windows.