How to Disable Balloon Tips In Windows XP

One of my personal annoyances is all the little pop -up notifications coming from the system tray in the lower right hand corner of Windows computers. These little pop-ups are called balloon tips and can give you notification for almost anything (my favorite is the ever popular: "You just printed something!"). Anyway - my first action when configuring a new computer is to immediately turn this feature off but the tricky part is that Microsoft opted to not give us a way to disable these lovely little notifications through the system settings. The only way to turn these items off is to modify the system registry.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Ability to work with the Windows registry.

1. Click Start and choose Run...

2. Type in Regedit and hit ok.

3. Navigate the registry to HKEY_Current_User\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVerion\Explorer\Advanced

4. In the right hand pane right click and choose the option to create a new DWORD.

5. Name the new DWORD: EnableBalloonTips

6. Ensure that the value of EnableBalloonTips is set to 0 (it should be 0 by default).

7. Close the registry editor and log out of your user account.

8. Log back in and you should no longer have those annoying little pop-ups down in the corner.

Tips & Warnings

• This will only effect the user that is logged in. Other users on the same computer will have to repeat the process.
• This requires a change to the Windows registry. Making changes to the registry can cause problems if not done properly and may result in your system no longer functioning. Major registry problems may require a rebuild of your computer.

[goodselfme]

on 8/4/2009 Good and useful tips to disable the balloon tips in Microsoft windows XP