How To: Use a Pen Drive as a Key for Your Computer

Traditionally we use lock and keys to lock away anything that is precious, valuable or important to us. After all
, for most of us our computer is the most valuable possession. Most of us use passwords and other means of software based protection techniques to keep intruders at the bay. But using a hardware based security setup for your computer, decreases your risk of losing your data to hackers.

Using a pen drive as a key for your computer might look something from the spy books, but it is easy to set up and comes in handy at times. All you need is a pen drive that you’ll have with you always.
We’ll be doing this using an inbuilt windows utility called the sys key.
Using a Pen Drive as your Computer Key
1. You need to assign A: as your removable disk drive. This is important because sys key was basically designed for floppy drives.
2. Press Start and type “disk management”, obviously without quotes and press Enter.
3. Connect your Pen drive and right click on the relevant drive and click rename and change it.
4. Press [Win] + [R] again and type “SysKey” and press enter.
5. Click Update then select Store key on floppy disk and click ok.

6. A file called Startkey.key will be created on your selected Pen drive and it’ll be required every time you boot your computer.
This nifty utility can help you save your computer from prying minds as your computer won’t boot up without it. But it is necessary that you keep that pen drive safe.
Hope this helped you to set up your pen drive as a key for your computer. Do share with your friends and let us know if you had any difficulties in the process.