Disable windows 7 autoplay and scan and fix

After installing a fresh copy of Windows I always spend a day or so disabling all those ‘handy’ features like ‘hiding my file extensions’, UAC, Bitlocker and other stuff I really don’t care about. ‘Do you really want to start Visual Studio?‘. Yes please, it’s what I do all day.

One of the most annoying dialogs is the ‘Do you want to scan and fix…” dialog. Let’s raise a semi modal dialog to tell the user there might be something wrong with the USB drive. I even had to re-read that sentence to be sure I read it correctly.

And then let’s suggest more options. In a new modal dialog! That’s two mouseclicks I have clicked at least a thousand times.  Not a very nice user experience.

Chances of me wanting to scan and fix a USB drive that works properly? 0%

Chances of me wanting Windows 7 to burn my files for me? 0%

Chances of me choosing any of the other suggestions Windows gives me when I insert a disc or USB drive? Near 0%.

Disable the scan and fix dialog and autoplay dialog

Getting rid of the dialogs is easy. Open the control panel and search for ‘service’.

Click ‘view local services’ and find: ‘Shell hardware Detection’.

WARNING! Change these Windows settings at your own risk!

Disable the service. Windows will ask if you want to stop the Windows Image Acuisition (WIA) service also. On my laptop this was no problem and I can still scan images form FSViewer and Photoshop.