Discussion Forums/PDQ Inventory/Inventory - Feature Requests

PlannedDoneNot planned

USB flash only disable

Showtime33
suggested this on December 13, 2011 09:16

not sure how popular this will become or is becoming....but disabling USB FLASH ONLY on pc's might be a nice feature added....(security policies for admins)

thats right this does not kill your printer or anything else only usb DRIVES....

here is how to do it via reg:

******************************

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\USBSTOR]
"Start"=dword:00000004

******************************

I believe it works on the fly (no restart needed) and can be re-enabled on the fly also....(change the 4 to a 3)

now maybe this could be done per user...? using 'hkey_current_user' references....but I have not tried.....?

thoughts?

 

Comments

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Shane Corellian
Admin Arsenal

Thanks for sharing. I will test this out later tonight.

You can accomplish this by running the Reg.exe command via the Remote Command tool in PDQ Inventory. You could run it against one computer, multiple computers or even an entire collection. Below is a screenshot after I ran the command on one target.

Inv-RemoteCommand.png

If this is a command you think you may need to run often and you are running PDQ Inventory in Pro mode you could create a Custom Tool to do this (or any other) registry tweak. 

Go to Preferences (under File menu) and select the Custom Tools panel. Click on the Add Tool button and define this action. See image below.

Inv-CustomTool-RegMod.png

Note that I am adding the variable %TARGETHOSTNAME% to the Command Line field. This way when I have a computer enabled in PDQ Inventory and I choose to run this custom tool the computer name will populate the TARGETHOSTNAME variable. This was not necessary when creating a Remote Command (the first example) because the remote command is just that: it is a command that PDQ Inventory executes directly on the target system. A custom tool, on the other hand, is executed from the PDQ Inventory console machine.

I can call this command from the Tools menu (or right-click Tools) as well as the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Alt+1.

Inv-CustomTool-Execute.png

 

Of course this example can (and should) be extrapolated to apply to any other task or tool that you need to run on your targets.

You can also use the Registry scanner (if you are running in Pro mode) to verify that the registry is set appropriately on your targets.

Let us know if you'd like an example of doing that and we'll be happy to post one. 

December 13, 2011 17:02
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Showtime33

wow that is simply awesome.....I think I will have to play with the pro mode!

 

a good place to start creation of expert reg changes is to download simple performace boost....

 

check their tool out here...

http://www.tweaking.com/content/page/simple_performance_boost.html

maybe begin with speedy changes....:)

December 14, 2011 10:33