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Kill The Balloons In Windows XP
Microsoft
XP has been called the Fisher Price operating system for more than
just its bright colors and rounded edges. This is an OS for
everyone, clear and easy to use and stable. If you are ever lost, balloon tips
appear to tell you where a new program is hiding, among other
"helpful" messages. While these tips can be convenient for mom and
pop, they are far from necessary for the power user. Some of these
tips, like the balloon urging you to sign up for a Passport account,
give up after a while and stop coming out to play. Others, like the
balloon reminding you to download and install the latest and
greatest from Windows Update, never leave you, and piss you off
forever. You can get rid of them all in one fell swoop, and this was the
first thing I did when I installed XP on my home computer. I had
enough settings and tweaks to worry about without Windows telling me
that it put the Photoshop icon in the Programs menu. Just be careful to check Windows Update often, because your
friendly animated reminder will not pop up to help you out. Another
thing you will miss in Windows' reminder that hard-drive space has
run low. You will still get a little picture of a hard drive in your
task bar, but you won't be accosted by a big yellow balloon that
won't go away. There are two ways to do this little operation. One, you can go
Once you have it installed, go to Taskbar and uncheck "Enable Balloon Tips." This is the easy way to do it, but you're looking at about a 1MB download. If your Internet connection is really slow, your time is limited, or you just hate downloading things, I bring you a second, more risky way as a public service. You can perform a registry hack as well. As you probably already know registry hacks take place immediately and can cause damage to your system. So a word of advice either back up your registry or don't mess with anything if you don't know what it does. The Key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\ Create a new DWORD value, name it EnableBalloonTips, and set it equal to 0. If EnableBalloonTips is already there and equal to 1, set it equal to 0. Quit the registry editor, log off, and log back on. Voila! Your computer will stop talking down to you. Bonus: The Windows XP registry comes with a favorites menu. Now you can tweak and nudge and bump without having to keep a list of keys stashed around.
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