If you’re using a third-party CD burning tool such as Nero or Roxio and want to disable the built-in CD Burning features provided by Windows Vista, you can do so using the NoCDBurning Policy setting. Follow these steps to disable the built-in CD Burning features in Windows Vista:

1 Click Start, type regedit.exe and press ENTER:

2 Navigate to the following branch:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Policies \ Explorer

3. In the right-pane, create a 32-bit DWORD value named NoCDBurning

4. Double-click NoCDBurning and set its Value data as 1

5. Exit the Registry Editor.

Automate the above using a .REG file

To automate the above setting, download disablecdburn_vista.zip and double-click the enclosed file named disablecdburning.reg. If you want to reverse the changes, run the file named enablecdburning.reg.

Enabling this Policy removes the CD-RW drive entry (shown in the figure below) from the Send To menu.

Additional Tip: You can hide *all* the drive-letters from the Send To menu using the NoDrivesInSendToMenu registry value, which we have covered in our March 2007 article How to hide drive-letters from the Send To menu in Windows Vista. This speeds up loading of the Send To menu also.

MORE INFORMATION

The NoCDBurning value corresponds to Remove CD Burning features Group Policy setting. If your edition of Windows Vista has the Group Policy Editor (gpedit.msc), you can configure this setting via:

User Configuration | Administrative Templates | Windows Components | Windows Explorer

You can configure the setting Remove CD Burning features there.

If you enable this setting, all features in the Windows Explorer that allow you to use your CD writer are removed. If you disable or do not configure this setting, users are able to use the Windows Explorer CD burning features.

Note: This setting does not prevent users from using third-party applications to create or modify CDs using a CD writer.

Bookmark this Page!

BlinkList | del.icio.us | Digg it | Furl | reddit | Spurl | StumbleUpon |

Related Posts


Email SubscriptionPrefer an E-mail subscription?

Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner

One Response to “Enable and Disable Built-in CD Burning Features in Windows Vista” Subscribe to comments!

  1. said this on Tuesday, September 15th 2009 11:42 am

    I was getting a nag every time I accessed any CD and when I changed directories in a CD. I thought this trick might help, but it didn’t work at all, there was no such key. I found the hack I needed anyway. In:

    [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\CD Burning\Drives\Volume{221acf4e-9381-11de-a42c-806e6f6e6963}\Current Media]

    I changed the value of “Blank Disc” from dword:00000001 to dword:00000000

Leave a Reply