Disable Balloon Tips in Windows Vista

This article explains how to disable balloon tips in Windows Vista. Balloon tips are notifications that are displayed on the desktop whenever an event is triggered. While they can be helpful at times, they are more often than not annoying, especially if they pop up when you are working on something else at the time.

I thought it would be a nice follow up article to the one describing how you can make the balloon tips on the Vista operating system transparent.I personally think that Balloon Tips have no right to be there at all, they look awful and most do not contain information that are important in any way.

I disabled them the first day I started using Windows XP and I did the same on my Windows Vista notebook. Balloon Tips are a waste of time in my opinion. Let me explain how you can disable balloon tips in Windows Vista.

• Press Windows+R, enter gpedit.msc and hit enter. This opens the Group Policy Editor. Please note that the Group Policy Editor (gpedit.msc) is not available in Windows Vista Home and Vista Home Premium. I'm going to outline how to disable balloon tips on those editions below.
• Go to User Configuration, Administrative Templates, Start Menu and Taskbar.
• Select Remove Balloon Tips, right-click it and choose properties from the context menu
• Select Enable from the options and click ok
• Close the Group Policy Editor
• Reboot Windows Vista

As I said earlier gpedit.msc is not available in Windows Vista Home and Home Premium which means that we have to rely on the registry to disable those annoying balloon tips in Windows Vista.

• Press Windows+R, type regedit and hit enter. This starts the registry editor
• Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Explorer/Advanced
• Create a new Dword and name it EnableBalloonTips
• The value should be automatically set to 0, if it is not change it to 0
• Reboot Windows Vista

The changes take effect after the system has been restarted.

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