In some particular situations you may want to prevent copying content from your computer onto a USB stick. For instance, if you are working with highly confidential data or copyrighted material, you might want to restrict other user from copying this. As USB devices are extremely handy, anyone can easily copy contents from a computer, so this protection is very useful in some instances.

USB WriteProtector is a handy tool for Windows that allows users to disable USB devices from copying contents from a computer. You can very easily enable or disable this by clicking a button. (You can also do the same by modifying a registry key. Read below how to do this in XP)

Download USB WriteProtector (190Kb) from http://www.gaijin.at/dlusbwp.php and unzip it in a folder. Run the USB WriteProtector exe, select your language, click ‘USB write protection ON’ button for write protecting USB devices. You can disable it at any time by clicking on ‘USB write protection OFF’ button.

[By modifying a registry key, you can also disable writing to USB devices. Here is how. Click Start – Run. Type ‘regedit’ and hit enter.

Now navigate to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ System\ CurrentControlSet\Control
Right click on ‘Control’ and create a new key and name it StorageDevicePolicies. On the right pane create a new DWORD value by right clicking and name it WriteProtect, give it a value of “1″ and reboot your PC. Now no one can copy content onto USB devices. To re-enable this, change the DWORD value to 0. This is what the above tool does.]