The inspiration for writing this post occurred to me over the weekend, when I got the chance to meet some friends who happened to work for an IT Giant here in Bangalore. Over a cup of coffee and the usual conversations, one of my friends pointed out that they have an out of the ordinary situation in their office. Their company’s System Administration team has disabled access to the USB Ports. This means that their iPods, Digital Cameras and USB flash drives are totally without use in the workplace.

As stated by the Microsoft knowledge base article 823732, which contains instructions on disabling USB storage access for a group of users, disabling and re-enabling of USB ports is just based on a simple registry entry.

To disable the access to USB port, for windows XP and 2000, simply follow the steps written below:

1. Go to the Start button of your desktop and then click on Run.

2. In the Run field, type in regedit and click OK or press Enter on the keyboard.

3. Look for, and then click on the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesUsbStor

4. In the right pane of the window, double-click the Start option.

5. In the Value data box, type in the number 4, click Hexadecimal (if it is not already selected by default), and then click OK or press Enter.

6. Leave and close the Registry Editor window.

To re-enable a disabled port, just follow the steps below:

1. Click on the Start button, and again, select Run.

2. In the Run field, type regedit, and click OK or press Enter.

3. Look for, and then click on the following registry key.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesUsbStor

4. In the right pane of the window, double-click the Start option.

5. In the Value data box, type in 3, click Hexadecimal (if it is not already selected by default), and click OK or hit Enter on the keyboard.

6. Leave and close the Registry Editor window.