Changing the timeout interval for selecting a hardware profile via the registry

Q. How can I change the timeout interval for selecting a hardware profile via the registry?

A. You can change the amount of time the list of hardware profiles is displayed via the Hardware Profiles tab of the System Control Panel applet. To change this value directly in the registry, perform the following steps:

1. Start the registry editor (regedit.exe).
2. Navigate to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\IDConfigDB registry subkey.
3. Double-click the UserWaitInterval and set the base to decimal. Enter the time in seconds to wait and click OK.
4. Close the registry editor.

You can also set the timeout interval via a .reg file by saving the following as timeout.reg and running Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00.

\[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\IDConfigDB\] "UserWaitInterval"=dword:00000014

The UserWaitInterval is the value in seconds in hexadecimal (base 16), so if you want to set the interval to 20 seconds this would be a value of 14 (which is decimal 20 in base 16). Thanks to Joseph Whitehead for providing this registry file.

—John Savill