Tip of the day- Popping Balloons

balloons [photo found on sirbrett84's flickr page]

Ah yes, from the pic above you can see that the age old issue of suppressing Windows on an embedded device bites another developer that was unaware you could (or would need to) suppress a few annoying habits of Windows. Jim also discussed this in his article StickyKeys last year which also has a great pic of a device 'exposing' itself as Windows.

To suppress balloons from the tray, it's as simple as editing a registry key or two. You can suppress these balloons by editing the following registry keys in the image:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ Software\ Microsoft\ Windows\ CurrentVersion\ Explorer\ Advanced]
Value Name: EnableBalloonTips
Data Type: REG_DWORD (DWORD Value)
Value Data: (0 = disabled, 1 = enabled)
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ Software\ Microsoft\ Windows\ CurrentVersion\ Explorer\ Advanced]
Value Name: Start_NotifyNewApps
Data Type: REG_DWORD (DWORD Value)
Value Data: (0 = no, 1 = yes)

Here's an article in our FAQ from 4 years ago that also covers 'popping balloons in your embedded image'.

Now, with all that said, the most concerning thing to me from that pic is that no firewall is turned on or possibly even installed. Let's hope that device had a third party FW on the box that wasn't registered with the system and that the balloon was incorrect.

- Andy