Turn off balloon tips

TURN OFF BALLOON TIPS IN NOTIFICATION AREA

The Notification Area is the new name for what was formerly called the System Tray in previous versions of Windows. It is the part of your Taskbar on the righthand side, where the System time is displayed. All sorts of programs put various icons in that area. For example, all the various instant messaging utilities, such as Windows Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger, will put a little icon there which you can click to start up the associated program. When you are connected to the internet, there is a little icon that looks like two side-by-side monitors put there which you can right click to show the status of your connection or to disconnect it. Antivirus programs also commonly put an icon there, as well as firewall programs like ZoneAlarm, and many others.

When you first install Windows XP, you will get a large "balloon tip" that appears whenever the status of any of the programs connected with these Notification Area icons changes. For example, when you first get connected to the internet, there is commonly some message popping up about the connection. And until and unless you acquire a MSN passport, there will constantly be interrupted by a ballon tip requesting you to do just that.

Most of these balloon tips are pretty useless and can be very irritating. How to get rid of them? The method is explained in the following Knowledge Base article from Microsoft:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;307729
HOW TO: Disable Notification Area Balloon Tips

You have to be willing to edit the Registry to turn off the balloon tips. You click the Start button, then click Run, type REGEDIT and click OK.

In the left pane of the Regedit window navigate to the following key and click it:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced

Now right click in the right pane, select New and DWORD value from the Context Menu that scrolls out. Name it EnableBalloonTips. Double click the value and give it a value of 0 (zero). Quit Regedit, log off Windows and then log back on. Notification Area balloon tips have been disabled for the user. You can modify the value to 1 (one) in order to get back the Balloon tips.

It's an awful feeling when you've been typing away and then notice after the fact that the Caps Lock has been on the whole time. Luckily you don't need to go back and re-type everything when you know this trick.

1. Press CTRL+A to select all the text in a text box, or use the mouse to highlight the text you need to change.
2. Press SHIFT+F3 to change the caps to lower case.
3. Now just re-type the letters that need to be capitalized.