Eugh. I hate viruses. Even when they seemingly do nothing but implant annoying files on my flash drive and waste my time in cleaning them off.

For the last two years, we’ve had some version of an autorun virus floating around on the old macs.  When you plugged your flash drive into the mac, it would write an autorun.inf file and a hidden .exe file onto the flash drive.

Now, we’ve upgraded to PCs with Windows XP.  It only took a few months for the entire network to become infected.  I think the tech coordinator may have quashed the virus in the media center computers, but I think it’s still alive and kicking in my classroom.  Unfortunately, due to the user permissions she set, I can’t effectively clean it off my computer.

Instead, I follow a ritual in cleaning the files off my flash drive. If you’re facing a similar problem, check out the quick guide I wrote for Associated Content on how to clean an autorun.inf file off your flash drive. It shows you how to delete the files from a command prompt as well as how to write a batch file to automatically delete the files with a simple click of the mouse.