Question
How can I turn off the Windows XP message pop-ups that appear at the lower right hand portion of the screen above the Taskbar? These messages appear when the Internet is first connected, when Windows updates are available, or if files are ready to be written to CD.
Answer
These messages are called “balloon tips” and they appear in the “notification area” of your desktop, which is located in the lower right-hand corner by the clock. Many people find balloon tips annoying and want to know how to make them go away. Unfortunately, you can’t selectively remove only the most annoying balloons; when you turn them off, you turn all of them off.
Although you can change a registry setting, it’s much easier to use the free Tweak UI Power Toy from Microsoft to turn off balloon tips. 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 turn off balloon tips.
Even without balloon tips, you may have a whole lot of stuff in the notification area. If you have a lot of applications that load when you turn on your computer, you may have a whole slew of little icons in the lower right-hand corner of your screen.
If you don’t want to see quite so many icons you can change your Taskbar settings, so they don’t show. To hide your icons, right-click on an empty spot in the Taskbar and choose Properties. In the Taskbar tab, make sure Hide inactive icons has a checkmark. When it does, the Customize button is available.
Click the Customize and in the Customize Notifications window you see all the icons in your Notification area listed. Highlight an icon and change the Behavior drop-down to change whether or not the icon will appear. You can select from Hide when inactive, Always hide, or Always show. Click Okay, Apply, and then OK to close the Taskbar and Start menu Properties dialog box.
With just a few tweaks, you can clean up that annoying lower right corner of your desktop.