I have 2 external USB harddrives that are on/active during the boot process. I believe that Windows7 is looking at those drives while booting, which is causes bootup to take longer. Is there a way that I can disable these drives until after the OS has booted to the logon screen?
Solution:
Quoted:I have received a few questions about this method – no it will not disable mice, or keyboards. It only disables storage devices attached to the USB port. This includes hard drives, flash drives, and any other type of USB storage device. And yes, if the user has administrator access they can reverse the changes.
How it operates is simple, we set aregistry key that tells the UsbStordriver not to load on boot:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesUsbStor
Start = 4 (Disabled) -Don’t start thedriver on boot
Start = 3 (Enabled) -Start the driver on boot