Disable those annoying Windows balloons

by Amber Rhea Sep 13th 2006

Are you sick of those Windows balloons telling you that you have unused icons on your desktop or that your LAN is connected? I don't doubt that about 1 in 100 people finds the notifications useful, but for the other 99 of us, here's a way to pop the balloons once and for all.

Follow these steps (note: this has been tested only on Windows XP):

Go to Start > Run; type regedit and press Enter.
In the Registry Editor, navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Explorer \ Advanced
Create a new DWORD value by going to Edit > New > DWORD Value. Name it EnableBalloonTips and give it value 0.
Exit the Registry Editor.
Log off Windows and login again to see your changes take effect.

To re-activate balloon notifications, change the value of EnableBalloonTips to 1.

[Via Techie Corner]

Tags: balloon notifications, BalloonNotifications, hacks, regedit, registry, Windows hacks, Windows notifications, Windows registry, Windows XP, WindowsHacks, WindowsNotifications, WindowsRegistry, WindowsXp

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

lakiolen said 2:34PM on 9-13-2006

Or you could alternatively use TweakUI to disable those balloons as well as do many other useful things. And it is actually provided by Microsoft.

Qwfwq said 3:34PM on 9-13-2006

I must be in those 1%, as most of the times I find the notifications helpful!

dsfsdfsdf said 4:14PM on 9-13-2006

or you just click on the "X" once and the balloon never appears again.

lakiolen said 4:51PM on 9-13-2006

@dsfsdfsdf

Why should one have to stop working to move the mouse potentially across the entire screen and back, or exiting a fullscreen app just to make some useless notification go away? There are also times when you wouldn't want them to appear in the first place, such as a presentation and the wifi notification.

Thank god Microsoft smartened up and made the notification fade out in Vista.

Masrk O'Leary said 7:25AM on 9-14-2006

It's a really bad idea to disable the balloons if you actually make use of secure wireless networks. The XP 802.1X wireless client uses a balloon at a key point in the connection process for user input. With balloons disabled, this just hangs and you can't get any further.

Elias said 12:23PM on 9-14-2006

I wish the balloons were more like growl notifications. I hate the fact that they stay there forever until dismissed. I also hate that you can't have more than one balloon at a time. Meaning, if there are 3 notifications, you get them in succession after you dismiss the previous one. It's really annoying.

noballoons said 12:33PM on 11-17-2006

Balloons are bullshit.

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