There’s one major pain in the keister every iPhone or iPod Touch owner has to put up with on a daily basis. You plug in your phone simply to top up the battery and you have to deal with the annoying AutoPlay pop-up Windows insists on displaying. Try as I might, I cannot find an option to “Do Nothing” and am forced to click the big X at the top right, which does not jive so well with the “Always do this for this device” option. Disabling this feature is quite simple to do, if you know where to look.
Windows 7 / Vista
Open your Start Menu
Type “autoplay” in the search box and hit enter
Scroll to the bottom until you see your iPhone/iPod’s name
Click the dropdown box and select Take no action
Click Save
Windows XP
Open your Start Menu
Select Control Panel
Open Printers and Other Hardware
Open Scanners and Cameras
Right click your iPhone or iPod Touch and choose Properties
Click the Events tab
From the dropdown next to Select an event choose Camera Connected
Select Take no action
Click OK
A seasoned Senior Solutions Architect with 18 years of experience in technology design and implementation. Renowned for innovative solutions and strategic insights, he excels in driving complex projects to success. Outside work, he is a passionate fisherman and fish keeper, specializing in planted tanks.
Point of order, if I may.
This is not the “iPhone’s Annoying Autoplay Pop-up”, but more correctly, it is “Windows Annoying Autoplay Pop-up”. It happens when you insert your USB key, or your camera, and often happens when you insert a new CD. As you correctly point out, you turn it off within Windows, and it has nothing at all to do with the iPhone.
Also, the image you’re displaying actually helps to illustrate my point – it shows the Vista/Windows 7 autoplay dialog …. for a Palm Pre!
@Gary
You’re right, it is Window’s popup. But in order to have a short and concise title I didn’t elaborate on that fact. iTunes itself does have an annoying auto-open feature when you plug in your phone but I also didn’t elaborate on that or how to disable it (I find iTunes auto-launching more annoying, to be honest). As for the Palm Pre comment, you obviously didn’t read the alt tag for the image, did you?
Are you trying to say that the 42 characters in the current title is shorter than if you entitled the article as “Kill Windows Annoying AutoPlay Pop-up” which only has 37 characters? As much as I like the number 42, when I was at school, 37 was always a smaller number. Have some math fundamentals changes while I wasn’t looking? 🙂
Regarding the alt tag, you’re correct. I did not. Thanx fr that clarification; I’m sure I’m not the only one who’ll benefit from this clarification.
Cheers.
@Gary
Nope, I’m saying it’s shorter than “Kill Window’s Annoying AutoPlay Pop-up That Occurs Every Time You Plug in Your iPhone” which is much longer than either of the two you listed. As this post was meant for offering a solution to an issue that several iPhone users have asked me about it was important that the term iPhone was in the title (and also from an SEO perspective).
I don’t know whether it was the name or the content but either way I came here after searching for “iPhone pop up”.
I believe that this single tip will save me about 2 hours over the year. Waiting for Imaging to load is the most annoying thing about owning an iPhone. 🙂
Thank you for posting this.
how to get back autoplay pop-up when iphone is connected to usb in windows xp?
@ Kish: See http://www.question-defense.com/2009/07/23/stop-the-auto-play-pop-up-when-you-plug-in-your-iphone-or-ipod-touch-to-a-windows-xp-computer/ and just reverse the steps.
No matter what the title of this article, I found it useful. And yes, I googled “annoying iphone popup” and this was first in the list. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know it’s a Windows popup…
got here by way of google search “disable ipod windows insert popup” regardless, thanks for the info…what a hassle it was.
My problem is that autoplay displays my son’s iphone name (ben10’s iPhone) for mine (Tom’s iPhone). How can I change the name back to my iphone? Also Windows Explorer reads my iphone with my son’s iphone name. Can that be changed also? Can anyone help me?