If you let your friends, family or partner to access your Windows 7, it is better you protect it with any security. There are many security protections that you can apply for your Windows 7 and here in this post I will share you how to disable write access to USB device that will disable copy any data from your Windows 7 to their USB hard drive or flash disk or it will make any USB drive to become read only device.
You can do it from registry and here is the way:
1. Click Start button from taskbar and type regedit on the search form and it will show regedit.exe and click it to open Windows 7 registry editor.
2. If you enable UAC (User Account Control) on your Windows 7 it will ask your permission and click Yes.
3. Dig registry to “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\”.
4. Right click on it and create new key with name StorageDevicePolicies.
5. Right click on it and create new Dword (32 bit) value with name WriteProtect.
6. Double click WriteProtect and set it to 1.
Now all users on your computer can’t copy anything to any USB drive. To prove it just plug any USB drive to your Windows 7 and try to copy data to it and surely you can’t. If you want to enable write access to USB storage someday, just delete StorageDevicePolicies or set WriteProtect value to 0. Enjoy it!