How to turn off autoplay for external drives?

I have a number of external drives connected to my PC. When I boot, they all present an autoplay window asking how I want to proceed. I am trying to get them to do nothing at all - I rarely need to open the drives, they just contain data files that various programmes use when I run them.

Searching for a solution has not fixed anything...

"..... go to the autoplay tab inthe drive's Properties window and then..." - there isn't an autoplay tab.
"..... go to Autoplay in the Control Panel..." - The Devices pane is empty; all I have is options for movies, DVDs, CDs etc. Nothing for drives.
"..... create a new DWord called NoDriveTypeAutoRun in the registry and set the value...." - makes no difference at all, I get the same autoplay window for the drives.

And so on. I've found as many supposed solutions by Googling as I have drives (many) but nothing so far has lived up to its promise and stopped an autoplay window opening for the external USB drives I have connected, or subsequently plug in.

Does anyone know what I do need to do to fix this, (admittedly small annoyance: I just have to close all the dialogue windows each time, but they do spend several minutes sometimes searching for contents, quite unnecessarily; and small annoyance or not, it would be good not to have to manually close all the autoplay windows every time I (re)boot).

Many thanks.

I have it disable, but don't remember how I did.

Open Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\AutoPlay
When you open "View more Autoplay Options there is a check box in the upper left corner that say "Use Autoplay for All Media and Devices". You can un-check this box to disable Autoplay.

Read this
Disable external USB drive autoplay? Windows 7 Pro. - Microsoft Community

Hi. Thanks, but I suppose that would also stop any autoplay for DVDs and so on, which I didn't really want to happen, ideally.

I have 3 external drives- blu-ray, RAM and Rom on my system. None of them ask me anything after a boot, even if there is a disc in them (except for an installation CD and that's if the BIOS is set to boot from a CD). I don't have the setting mentioned by Megahertz07 unchecked.

Do you have all Win 7 updates installed? It sounds like you have Autorun enabled and that was disabled in Vista and later by an update.

I wonder if you would provide a screenshot of your AutoPlay settings?

Hi. Yes, I have all the Windows 7 updates.

I think (as far as I recall) that once upon a time, I did not have any autorun window open up for connected USB drives either (not 100% sure, but pretty certain), in which case something has 'happened'.

In fact, I only use the PC in question for flightsim (X-Plane 11): the PC itself doesn't even have a DVD drive (I use an external USB DVD drive on the rare occasions I need one), so I simply unchecked the autoplay box, as suggested. On this PC it won't really matter (and I have another PC next to it I use for all my other stuff, photo editing, email etc.).

However, in the interests of knowing what the problem might be (always good to get to the bottom of these things, even if a 'sticking plaster job' has covered up the problem, here's a screenshot of the autoplay page in Control Panel (is that what you were asking for?).

I'm a little confused because, in your first post, you said you have "a number of external drives." What are those?

If you're using a pro or higher version of Win 7, then use group policy. This is a sheer fire way of turning off autoplay. To get into group policy. In the Start orb under search enter gpedit.msc. Now go to, Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Click Autoplay Policies.

Enable, Disable AutoPlay in Windows 10/8/7

I'm a little confused because, in your first post, you said you have "a number of external drives." What are those?

I am confused too now. USB3 external HDDs? Not sure where the confusion is/what you are asking...

If you're using a pro or higher version of Win 7

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Thanks