Disable Balloon Tips

Unless you've been tweaking your PC quite a bit then you have little yellow popups over the notification area of the system tray. They contain all sorts of information about various things like connectivity being established and are generally a good idea. It would be my personal choice to have them enabled automatically for the first 30 days (or so) after the installation has been completed and after that the end user should get an easy way to disable them.

So, if you're like me or anyone else that I know, you're sick and tired of seeing those tips and to be frank they don't do much now that you've been using the system for the past few years. Why not get rid of them?

The SIMPLE way is to cheat and go to one of my favorite sites on the planet...

· Troubleshooting Windows XP, Tweaks and Fixes for Windows XP

Look for line 11 - left hand side. The scripts there will take care of it for you. I'd trust anything from that site without even having to think about verifying the security of it.

For those of you who aren't so certain about such things then here's the manual method:

 Before attempting the following make sure you read and understand Registry Editing Warning.

1. Press WinKey + R to bring up the Run... dialog
2. Type regedit
3. Press the Enter key
4. In the Registry Editor dig down to:
   
   



5. On the right find "EnableBalloonTips"
   

   Note: if it's not there then make it → up at the top select Edit, then New, and then select "DWORD Value" and give it the above name ("EnableBalloonTips")

6. Right-click the key ("EnableBalloonTips") and Modify the Hexadecimal value to 0 (zero) to disable the balloon tips
   

   Note: to re-enable the balloon tips you simply change the Hexadecimal value of this key back to 1

You might also find our articles MSCONFIG - Startup and Pesky Startup Apps of interest.

OS: XP > General
Date: 12/02/05

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