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USB drives serve a lot of purposes, but few people know that you can turn an average USB drive into a security feature with very little work. Using a free piece of software called USB PC Lock Pro you can have your computer automatically lock itself the moment you step away, and all you have to do is remove the USB drive.
USB PC Lock Pro comes with almost 10 plug-ins for doing things like muting the audio on your computer or putting your Windows/MSN Messenger status to away. It can also pause anything playing in Windows Media Center, and upon your return the media will begin playing again.
You can pick and choose which of the features you want to enable, and from what I gather this should work with any USB drive. It can also be setup to recognize multiple USB drives.
USB PC Lock Pro is completely free and for Windows only. It needs to be installed on the computer that you want to use it on, and not on the USB drive itself.
The applications listed on SpeedApps page are rip-offs (at least most of them are if not all). Quite disappointing to see this post from you Ryan.
I was wondering why someone with such a bare-bones website had so many apps and no contact information.
You could set up a hotkey and a batch file to do several of these things at once anyway; though not as interesting as using your drive, it’d probably be a little more convenient.
Maybe useful if you are using the computer in a long session but if your work pattern involves using your computer and going away in quick intervals then it can prove tedious to physically plug out and then plug in the USB stick again .
This is pretty bad. That program was originally developed for a product called the “Wireless PC Lock”. It had a USB key and a wireless keyfob that locked the computer whenever the keyfob moved more than x feet from the USB key. You can even see in the screenshot the KeyFob ID in the window.
Just google for “Nir Halowani” to find out about all the GPL violations and software rip-offs he is linked to.
What do you mean rip-offs…can you elaborate?
Thanks for pointing that out. I’m staying right away.
It might surprise some of you, but I don’t know everything. I came across the program, thought it was useful, and decided to write about it. I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t check every single application to see if it was ripped off in some form or another. I’ve seen some of the other applications on the SpeedApps site featured on other reputable sites, so I guess we’re not the only ones falling for it.
Please tell us how to configure the KEYFOB ID,no detectedunathorized and authorized fob…When I insert my flash disk, nothing happens. What I might be missing here?
The usb pc lock is crap. Has a bunch of crap including a toolbar that is garbage that wants to be installed on your system. This software doesn’t work.
Speedapps is a keylogger!!! And it crashes IE constantly and is very hard to uninstall. “The applications listed on SpeedApps page are rip-offs (at least most of them are if not all). Quite disappointing to see this post from you Ryan.” I tried one of the apps and it did nothing. I unchecked the speedapps install box but it force installed the toolbar anyway. Piece of garbage.
Yes this true Speedapps has all sorts nasties inside, its crash my IE8 and taken over google search send me off to very dubious sites.