Attention all fans of Stump the PC Club: I’ve added a feature to have this column e-mailed to your computer weekly. The e-mail is easy to read and print out! Sign up HERE.

Also, we need more questions! E-mail us at thegadgetress@ocregister.com and please include “Help Me” in the subject line and please include your computer’s operating system and amount of memory.

And one last thing: The PC Club meets this Sunday, June 1, at Chapman College. Visit the club’s site for more details.

Now, back to this week’s question:

Question: I have a Dell tower computer, Canon scanner and printer. I bought a Western Digital MyBook 320-GB backup hard drive a year ago, and it has worked flawlessly. However, a few months ago (being a bit paranoid) I decided to keep its USB cable unplugged until I want to backup some files. My problem is each time I plug in the backup’s USB cable, my scanner is activated. This is not only annoying, it can also interfere with the backup process.

NOCCC: What I consider the abuse of the Windows Autoplay feature is the source of your annoyance.

A quote from MSDN Magazine: “The typical user scenario is this: a CD is inserted into the CD drive, the setup program runs automatically, and the user simply follows the on-screen instructions generated by the setup software. Without this mechanism, the user needs to find and open the My Computer folder, find the CD drive, double-click the icon, find the right program to run, and launch it. For novice users, all of these steps are far from obvious and can contribute to the perceived complexity of the PC.”

The above quote applied to Autoplay version one. Version two of Autoplay was expanded to include USB hard drives, flash drives, cameras, and other devices.

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