Disable Autoplay and Notification Balloons in Windows XP

Sometimes the “Autoplay” feature of the audio CDs and USB drives annoys us to a great extent. Suppose after you return back home after a tiresome day at your office and wish to relax for a while by connecting your external hard drive to your computer and it starts on the Autoplay feature each time then it is quite natural that you will get irritated. Another annoying feature of Windows XP is the notification balloon. Hence to solve both these problems we will discuss about how to disable this Autoplay feature for Audio CDs and USB drives and the notification balloons in Windows XP.

[Related: Restore Folder Options in Tools Menu When Disabled by Virus.]

Disabling the Autoplay feature

To achieve what you are aiming for the first and foremost step that needs to be performed is to navigate to “Run” (Win key+R) and type “gpedit.msc” and hit “Enter”.

What opens up before you is the “Group Policy Editor”. In this window just navigate through the following path :

Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\System\Turn off Autoplay

Double click on “Turn off Autoplay” to open a new window named “Turn off Autoplay Properties”. When the window opens up set the radio button to “Enabled” and change the “Turn off Autoplay on” to All Drives.

You are done with your job!!! You are now safe from the irritating Autoplay feature of Audio CDs and USB drives.

Disabling Notification Balloons

If you are a Windows XP user then you must have come across popups of some notification balloons trying to enrich your knowledge about something which you already know. This must irritate you at times and you must have thought about how to stop these popups of the notification balloons and if are still in search of an answer then here is what you should do. This process will disable all notification balloons so it is advised to proceed after giving a cautious thought about it.
How to achieve it ?
The initial job that needs to be done is to go to “Run” and in the space provided type “regedit” and click on “OK”.

The completion if the above step leads to opening of a new window named “Registry Editor”. Having opened the window navigate through the following path :

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

Having reached your destination after traversing through the above path just go to the right pane of the window and in any open area right click and select the path “New > DWORD Value”.

You should see a New Value #1 appearing. Change the name of this new registry to “EnableBalloonTips”.

Having renamed the new registry double click on it and in the new window that appears set the Value Data Field to 0(zero) and make sure that the selected base is Hexadecimal.

Check whether all operations have been performed to perfection and then finally restart your system and then enjoy your fresh computer free of any type of notification balloon. To remove this registry hack, just delete the registry key that you created.