How To Disable Balloon Tips in Windows 7 and Windows 8

Balloon Tip, those yellow popups, is a nice little feature that pops up from the taskbar trying to get your attention to check things like new emails, security settings, new updates. They could be very useful but can also be quite annoying to distract you from the work you are doing. So completely disabling it makes perfect sense to keep you concentrated.

Here is a simple registry hack to keeps balloon from popping up.

Open Registry Editor by pressing Win+R keyboard shortcut, type in “regedit”, and hit Enter. And then navigate to the following location:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced

Right-click to create a new DWORD, name it EnableBalloonTips. Setting the value to 0 that turns the balloon off. You will have to either log off and log back in or restart your computer to activate it.

Note that since the key is belong to HKEY_Current_User, the change you made only apply to the current user. The other users, if any, remain the same with Balloon Tips enabled.

This registry hack is not new. In fact, it’s so old that you can call it old-school trick. But the interesting part is, the old-school trick still work in the coming Window 8, though Balloon Tips in Windows 8 behavior a little differently from in Windows 7.