I haven’t had a new computer for a while. Since I got my cute silver laptop, I’m discovering that I must have made quite a few customizations to my main computer over time. For example, the silver machine has little pop-up balloons that appear the bottom right side of the screen that tell me obvious things like, "the wireless network is connected." Now that’s all very nice, but I don’t care to be reminded every time I boot up. Plus, it seems like throughout the computing experience, the computer has many fascinating things it wants to tell me with these little balloons.
In short, all this endless trivial nagging drives me nuts and I want the stupid balloons gone. Apparently, I did something to ditch the balloons a long time ago on my main machine.
Unfortunately, after a bit of Internet research, I discovered that it’s actually not easy to turn off these messages in the "notification area" (as it’s called). You have to edit the registry. To access the registry, click Start|Run and type regedit.
Now before you do anything in the registry, I suggest you back it up, since goofing up the registry can kill your computer. To back it up from within the XP Registry Editor, choose File|Export and save the file on your hard disk.
After you back up, follow these steps to disable the balloons:
1. In the registry, go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/ Windows/CurrentVersion/Explorer/Advanced
2. Now right click the Advanced folder and choose New|DWORD Value. Type in EnableBalloonTips.
3. Double-click your new EnableBalloonTips entry and ensure the Value Data is set to 0 (zero). Click OK
4. Choose File|Exit to leave the Registry Editor
You created a new entry that you now can turn off and on. The value of 0 means off and 1 means on. So if you miss those balloons, you can go back into the registry and switch the EnableBalloonTips value to 1.
However, you do have another option. I realized that on my main computer, I never messed with the registry. I downloaded the free Tweak UI Power Toy from Microsoft. You can get it here:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx
In Tweak UI, on the Taskbar and Start menu tab you’ll find an option to just say no to balloon tips.