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Tech Tips / Windows XP / Desktop and GUI

Disable Notification balloon tips

You have undoubtedly seen the yellow balloons that appear at certain times in the notification area. For instance, when you connect or disconnect the network cable, you'll see a message notifying you of the network's state. Most of the time, these balloons are quite useful, because they replace dialog boxes displayed in previous versions.

But sometimes these balloons can be very annoying. For example, if you don't have much free space on your hard drive, the balloons will keep reminding you of low disk space. You might like the first notification, but probably not the fifth, sixth, and so on. Fortunately, you can disable them by opening your favorite registry editor and going to
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced.

Create a new DWORD value with the name EnableBalloonTips and set it to 0. This setting should disable all notification balloons for the user. If you want to disable only low-disk-space balloons, set the NoLowDiskSpaceChecks DWORD value to 1. If this value is not in the same location as the previous one, create it manually.

If you don't want to mess with the registry, you can use the Tweak UI utility to do this for you. Run Tweak UI and go to the Taskbar option. Tweak UI is part of the PowerToys, which are available free from Microsoft.

Note: Be sure to back up the registry before editing it so that you can restore it if something goes wrong.