I miss my old, dumb task bar.

May 25, 2005 5:52 PM

Is there anyway to turn off those helpful XP features?

Those bubbles that pop up from the right corner of the toolbar drive me nuts. And I hate that items on the task bar start flashing blue when the program's state changes. I've looked through the options and there's no obvious way to kill these neato features.

posted by slipperywhenwet to technology (4 comments total)

TweakUI and Tweak All might be a good place to start. I know that "tooltips" is a feature usually enable on a program by program basis so you might need to check the user preferences on whatever program is popping up the tooltips.
posted by panoptican at 6:10 PM on May 25, 2005

You can turn off the balloons that come out of the taskbar with TweakUI (Taskbar and Start Menu -> [x] Enable Balloon Tips). As for the flashing, this happens when a program tries to "steal focus" -- i.e. bring itself to the front of whatever you're doing. In old versions of Windows, these programs would pop up, interrupting you. So, they decided that these apps shouldn't pop up, just flash in the task bar. In Tweak UI, you can specify the number of flashes in General -> Focus. Unfortunately you can't set it to 0, but you can uncheck "Prevent applications from stealing focus" and see how you like that.

If the things annoying you aren't in TweakUI or Tweak All, a good site to search on is annoyances.org, a companion site to the Annoyances series of books by O'Reilly Press.
posted by zsazsa at 8:34 PM on May 25, 2005

X-Setup is another good program for elaborate, fine-grained Windows tweaking. Unfortunately, it went from free to subscription, but there's a link to the last free version here.
posted by box at 8:50 PM on May 25, 2005

For the balloon tips, try XP AntiSpy, click the "Don't show BalloonTips anymore" options.
posted by quiet at 2:14 AM on May 26, 2005