Secret Trick to Disable / Turn Off Annoying Feature Advertisement Balloon Notifications in Windows 7

After reading the title, you must be thinking what is “Feature advertisement balloon notifications“? The best example to describe it would be “Take a tour of Windows XP” balloon notification tip which is shown in Windows XP Taskbar notification area just after doing a fresh installation of Windows. Got an idea? No? OK. Don’t put pressure on your mind, lets provide some more details!

Feature advertisement balloon notifications” are those annoying and irrelevant balloon tips which are not very useful for the end user. These balloon notifications are displayed in system tray of Taskbar and stay there until you close them or click on them to do what they actually want from you.

Some of best examples to describe these feature advertisement balloon notifications are as following:

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  • Take a tour of Windows XP balloon tip in Windows XP
  • There are unused icons on your Desktop balloon tip
  • Random notifications about task completed successfully by a program like Microsoft Office Outlook
  • The device can perform faster if you connect it to USB 2.0 port
  • Random separate notifications for a new hardware found
  • You have files waiting to be burned to disc balloon tip
  • Check firewall status, UAC turned off, etc

Feature_Advertisement_Balloon_Notifications_Windows_7.png

Now you must be having a clear idea what these annoying feature advertisement balloon notifications are? Lets describe in other words, feature advertisement balloon notifications are mainly used to make the user aware of a feature present in Windows or a 3rd party software. These notifications are not very important for the user so it becomes frustrating sometimes to get those unsolicited feature advertisements frequently in the midst of an important task.

By default Windows doesn’t provide any easy option to turn off / disable these irritating balloon notifications neither in Taskbar Properties nor anywhere else. Now the question comes, if someone wants to disable them, how would he do that?

Don’t worry! We can disable these annoying balloon pop-ups using Group Policy Editor or Registry Editor.

Today in this tutorial, we are going to share 2 easy to use methods to turn off annoying feature advertisement balloon notifications in Windows 7. These methods will not disable all balloon notifications in Windows. They’ll only disable these useless and annoying feature advertisement balloon notifications.

So without wasting time lets start the tutorial:

METHOD 1: Using Group Policy Editor (gpedit.msc)

1. Type gpedit.msc in RUN or start menu search box and press Enter. It’ll open Group Policy Editor.

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2. Now go to:

User Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Start Menu and Taskbar

Turn_Off_Feature_Advertisement_Balloon_Notifications_Windows_7.png

3. In right-side pane, double-click on “Turn off feature advertisement balloon notifications” option and set it to Enabled.

METHOD 2: Using Registry Editor (regedit)

Some Windows 7 editions like Starter, Home Basic and Home Premium don’t come with Group Policy Editor.

If you don’t want or can’t use Group Policy Editor, you can use Registry Editor for the same task:

1. Type regedit in RUN or start menu search box and press Enter. It’ll open Registry Editor.

2. Now go to following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\

3. Create a new key under Windows key and set its name to Explorer

4. Now select the new “Explorer” key and in right-side pane, create a new DWORD NoBalloonFeatureAdvertisements and set its value to 1

Disable_Feature_Advertisement_Balloon_Notifications_Windows_7.png

That’s it. Both of the above mentioned methods will permanently disable annoying feature advertisement balloon notifications in Windows.

NOTE: If you don’t want to modify Windows Registry manually and want a ready-made registry script to do the task automatically, download following ZIP file, extract it and run the extracted REG file. It’ll ask for confirmation, accept it:

Download Registry Script to Disable Feature Advertisement Balloon Notifications

Feel free to share your experience about these balloon notifications. Do you also find these useless advertisement balloon notifications annoying?

Published in: Troubleshooting Guides, Windows 7

About the author: Vishal Gupta (also known as VG) has been awarded with Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) award. He holds Masters degree in Computer Applications (MCA). He has written several tech articles for popular newspapers and magazines and has also appeared in tech shows on various TV channels.

Comments

NOTE: Older comments have been removed to reduce database overhead.

  1. Thanks for sharing, I have an old machine I will do this on. that USB one gets real annoying. Four of my six ports on it are USB 1.1 so I get that alert constantly.

  2. In the Registry Editor method above, clicking on the file “Turn Off Feature Advertisement Balloon Notifications in Windows 7” won’t work. If this happens Open Regedit, Click on File, then Import. Browse to where you have the file and select it, click Open then exit the Registry Editor.

  3. That’s brilliant. Since I wanted to play it easy, I chose the third option of “Download Registry Script…” It was helpful to the extent that the frequency that baloon showed up came down. Therefore I tried the first option and it has absolutely served my purpose. Thank you so much buddy.

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