Windows invites you to take a tour, your ISP tells you that you're online and the network card you disconnected complains about the lack of connectivity. The System Tray is always popping up annoying yellow info balloons. To stifle your PC's desire to communicate, one change to the Registry is enough.

Under Hkey _ CurrenC U ser\ Software \Microsoft\ Windows \Current Version \Explorer\ Advanced, change the value EnableBalloonTips from 1 to 0 (see screen 5). If it doesn't already exist, create it using New/DWORD string. By default, it will be set to 0 and you won't have to change it.

Windows hides more annoying features in the same Registry key, such as the info balloons for the Start button and the desktop icons. Every time you move the mouse pointer over the Start button you see a message that tells you to 'Click here to begin'. In exactly the same way, pop-ups tell you what desktop shortcuts do.

You can disable the balloon tip for the Start button by setting the value for StartButtonBalloonTip to O. To prevent Windows from showing a text box for every desktop icon, the value for ShowInfoTip must also be set to O. For the changes to take effect, you must reboot.