I recently bought a Tablet PC from Motion Computing and I use it for mobile working within our offices where we have a wireless access point set up. But when I'm near the perimeter of our wireless coverage area, I often lose connectivity temporarily and the result is an annoying balloon tip that says "Wireless Network Connection is now connected". It won't go away until I click the close gadget on it, and that's annoying. After all, I can check my wireless connectivity any time by clicking on the wireless network icon in my system tray, so who needs this extra notification?
Well I discovered you can kill all balloon tip notifications by tweaking the registry. Just open regedit.exe and find the following key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced
Now under this key create a new DWORD value named EnableBalloonTips and assign it the value of 0. Then log off and on again to make the setting take effect. The result? No more annoying balloon tips getting in the way of what you're trying to work on.
Postscript
But wait! It turns out that while this setting will disable most balloon tips, it won't disable them all. Here are a few more registry settings you can set to 0 to disable other balloons on Windows XP:
- HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced\ShowInfoTip
- HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced\FolderContentsInfoTip
- HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced\StartButtonBalloonTip
- HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\tips\Show
As usual, be careful editing your registry yadda yadda yadda ;-)
Mitch Tulloch (MVP Windows Server) is a well-known industry expert in Windows administration and security and author of fourteen books including the Microsoft Encyclopedia of Networking, the Microsoft Encyclopedia of Security, Windows Server Hacks and IIS6 Administration. Mitch is based in Winnipeg, Canada and is President of MTIT Enterprises, an IT content development company. You can find more information about him on his website www.mtit.com
