Windows Server,  Windows XP

Bubble Alerts w/ Silent Installs

When you push software to a Windows computer there’s an annoying little alert that pops up to tell the user that new software was installed. In one organization I was recently at this accounted for approximately 20 calls to the help desk every time they pushed out an update (patch Tuesday for them is one week after patch Tuesday for Microsoft).

To turn off the bubbles in your image, right-click on the start button and click on properties. Then click on the Customize button. Click Advanced and uncheck the box for Highlight newly installed programs. Not too bad. But don’t want to touch all of the existing machines. Open HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerAdvanced and click on the Start_NotifyNewApps, which would be a dword with a 00000001 value. Change it to 00000000. Wrap that into an msi and you can push it out with a GPO. Enjoy.