{"id":883,"date":"2014-05-28T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-05-28T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2014\/05\/28\/cargo-cult-registry-settings-and-the-people-who-swear-by-them\/"},"modified":"2014-05-28T07:00:00","modified_gmt":"2014-05-28T07:00:00","slug":"cargo-cult-registry-settings-and-the-people-who-swear-by-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20140528-00\/?p=883","title":{"rendered":"Cargo-cult registry settings and the people who swear by them"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Two customers (so far) wanted to know how to increase the duration of taskbar balloon notifications on Windows Vista. (By the way, I gave the answer <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/b\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2011\/05\/18\/10165605.aspx\"> some time ago<\/a>.)\n They claimed that on Windows&nbsp;XP, they were using the registry key <code>HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Software\\Microsoft\\Windows\\Current&shy;Version\\Explorer\\Tray&shy;Notify<\/code>, setting the value <code>Balloon&shy;Tip<\/code> to a <code>REG_DWORD<\/code> specifying the number of seconds the balloon should appear. They wanted to know if this still worked in Vista.\n Heck, it didn&#8217;t work even in Windows&nbsp;XP!\n That undocumented registry key actually controls whether the Windows&nbsp;XP taskbar should show the &#8220;To see the hidden icons, click this button&#8221; tip. It has nothing to do with how long the balloon stays on the screen.\n A quick Web search suggests that that particular setting has reached cult status, with everybody saying that the setting controls balloon duration, and nobody actually testing it. It&#8217;s just a matter of faith.\n Even the sometimes-suggested trick of <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/b\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2013\/11\/21\/10470023.aspx\"> putting the registry key name in MSDN so searches can find it and direct users to the correct method<\/a> wouldn&#8217;t have helped, because this was <i>the wrong registry key to begin with<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p> (Remember, the answer is in <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/b\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2011\/05\/18\/10165605.aspx\"> the linked article<\/a>.) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Two customers (so far) wanted to know how to increase the duration of taskbar balloon notifications on Windows Vista. (By the way, I gave the answer some time ago.) They claimed that on Windows&nbsp;XP, they were using the registry key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Software\\Microsoft\\Windows\\Current&shy;Version\\Explorer\\Tray&shy;Notify, setting the value Balloon&shy;Tip to a REG_DWORD specifying the number of seconds the balloon [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-other"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Two customers (so far) wanted to know how to increase the duration of taskbar balloon notifications on Windows Vista. (By the way, I gave the answer some time ago.) They claimed that on Windows&nbsp;XP, they were using the registry key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Software\\Microsoft\\Windows\\Current&shy;Version\\Explorer\\Tray&shy;Notify, setting the value Balloon&shy;Tip to a REG_DWORD specifying the number of seconds the balloon [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=883"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/883\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}