Notification area Windows 7: The missing option?

The settings for the notification area in Windows 7 have three options:

• Show icon and notifications
• Hide icon and notifications
• Only show notifications

Well here is my problem. I have a misbehaving application that doesn't have any settings to turn off notifications. And it keeps nagging me to update itself even though I know that the next version is not running properly. I do not want to see the reminder notification popup at all. But after all the application have some useful options that I use daily to perform tasks. These are accessible from the notification area/system tray.

I would like to silence the application by setting the option to something like:

• Only show icon

or

• Show icon and hide notifications

Otherwise I am forced to use the option "Hide icon and notifications" which makes me have to use at least one more mouse click every time I use the application.

A small problem in the great scheme of things... but very annoying (to me at least).

Is there any way to make the notification area behave like this?

As mentioned elsewhere, this is not how the Notification area is designed to operate. Notifications are its raison d'être, so being able to turn them off would be counter to the design goals of the system.

What it seems you really want to do is use it to open the program and don't care about notifications. For an equivalent solution, I would try something like this:

1. Hide the icon (and subsequently, the notifications) by dragging it into the notification area's pop-up box (or through your method, which you seem to prefer).
2. Create a folder somewhere containing only a shortcut to this program, pointing directly to its executable.
3. Right-click the taskbar, choose toolbars, and click "New toolbar...". Then navigate to the newly created folder and, without opening it, highlight it and click "Select Folder".
4. If you desire, unlock the taskbar and move/resize the new toolbar so that it is wherever you find it most useful.

This should work. I don't know the particular program you are struggling with, but those that I use often will not launch a new instance using this method, but open the existing instance. I believe that the program would have to instruct Windows specifically to not do this, though what mechanism that utilizes and whether this is true at all, is something I am not intimately familiar with.

Separate answer for a completely different tactic: you can disable balloon notifications for all notification area icons using local Group Policy. As HowToGeek explains,

1. Open gpedit.msc
2. "On the left side navigate to User Configuration \ Administrative Templates \ Start Menu and Taskbar"
3. "On the left side under Settings scroll down to “Turn off all balloon notifications” and double click."

I would not recommend this, as Windows occasionally uses these balloons for useful messages (your hard disk is failing, your battery is about to run out, etc.) — disabling the updates for your particular program is a much cleaner solution.

You haven't told us which program (or even what kind of program it is!), so your mileage may vary, but how about:

• Close the application
• Install and run the Fiddler web debugging proxy
• Launch the application
• Observe the hostname it contacts to check for an available update
• Block that hostname using an entry in the hosts file (very few all-inclusive tutorials for Windows 7, but I found one that looks mostly complete)
• Hope that the application doesn't bug out if it can't reach the update server, and fails silently instead (this should be the case for almost all non-internet applications)
• Enjoy life without update notifications until you remove the line you added to the hosts file!

If your application "helpfully" remembers the presence of an update from the last time it was able to contact the update server, you may need to uninstall and reinstall the old version with the hosts file blocking in place to prevent it seeing the new download.

This is not possible in the current Windows design. The notification bar was specifically designed to show notifications - the status quo of applications installing themselves here to show that they are still alive is the incorrect behaviour (they should be in the taskbar, not the notification bar).

But then it seems we're asking the wrong question. Why would you possibly want to not update? Updates can be protecting you from security vulnerabilities that could be used to compromise your machine. If it's your home machine they'll take your credit card details, and if it's your company one they'll take your company's IPR or your customer's credit card details (remember: 2 in 3 SMEs that get hacked go out of business within a year).

It seems to me that the best way to stop the application nagging you to update is probably to update the application.

i would go with the "Hide icon and notifications" option, and eliminate that extra mouse click by adding a shortcut to launch the program, right click the program's shortcut and add some key combination