Windows 7 is full of surprises, but not all of them are pleasant. The things that typically annoy people the most when using Windows are prompts that distract or interrupt the flow or work or play. Pop-up notifications, confusing confirmation dialog boxes, and unexplainable interruptions when copying or moving files are just a few of the common complaints. Read on to find out how to address them.
Q: How do I turn off the pop-up notifications that Windows 7 gives me about backups, antivirus software, and other things?
A: Some of Windows 7’s balloon notifications that emanate from the system tray do indeed seem difficult to disable. That’s probably because turning them off involves turning to a fairly unintuitive place: the Action Center.
Open the Start menu, type Action Center, and select the Action Center item that appears. From the left-hand pane of the resulting dialog box, select the “Change Action Center settings” link. Windows 7 will then slide the “Turn messages on or off” dialog box in front of you, and from there you can de-select any notifications that you don’t want to see. Remove them all to have an annoyance-free computing environment, click OK, and you’re done.
Q: I read that Windows 7 had done away with Vista’s User Account Control prompts. I installed Windows 7, and I still get the prompts. Why?
A: User Account Control (UAC), part of the beefed up security controls that Microsoft added in Windows Vista, did not go away in Windows 7. Microsoft simply made it easier to eliminate the annoying prompts. Here’s how.
Open the Start menu in Windows 7, and type UAC. You’ll see an entry labeled “Change user account control settings.” Click that, and the User Account Control Settings dialog box opens. Within that is a slider that allows you to determine exactly when you…