How to Disable AutoPlay in Windows 8 (Video)

Epoch Video
9/8/2014
Updated:
9/8/2014

The AutoPlay popup is an annoying aspect of Windows that rears it’s head any time you insert media.

AutoPlay is a Windows feature that allows you to choose which program to start up when you plug in a certain kind of media. It’s annoying and can have a negative impact on productivity. So here is how to stop that from happening.

Sure you can allow AutoPlay to pop up every time you insert some new form of media like a CD or a flash drive or even a SD card and you can choose via the drop down menu from windows to take no action or otherwise, but we want to disable it all together so it doesn’t even try anything on the drive.

So first of open up your control panel and look for hardware and sound and choose AutoPlay, if you don’t have category view on just select AutoPlay.

Under this menu you can choose your AutoPlay settings or just turn it off completely with the check box at the top. By turning off AutoPlay I disable any programs from automatically starting up whenever I plug in my flash drives because each of my flash drives requires a different type of program depending on their media.