Windows 2000, XP, Vista, and 7 all have balloon tooltip system notifications. Those tooltips are speech bubble notifications that appear around the system tray area. One advantage of those old-style balloon tooltips was that you could hover your cursor over them to keep them up longer if needed.

Windows 11 and 10 have different toast tooltips that flash up for about 5 to 10 seconds before disappearing. You can’t keep those notifications up longer by hovering the mouse over them. However, you can restore balloon-style tooltips in Microsoft’s most recent desktop platforms with the methods below.

How to Restore Balloon Tooltips by Editing the Registry

Windows 11 Home doesn’t have a built-in option for restoring balloon tooltips. Nevertheless, a bit of registry tweaking will restore balloon tooltips in Windows 11. You can manually add an EnableLegacyBalloonNotifications DWORD to the registry to restore old-style tooltips as follows.

  1. To open the search box, press the Win + S keyboard shortcut.
  2. Type Registry Editor within the search utility to find that app.
  3. Click Registry Editor to open its window.
  4. You will need to navigate to the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer key in the registry. Input that registry key location in the address bar, and press the Enter key.
  5. Right-click the Explorer registry key in the left navigation pane to select New > DWORD (32-bit) Value.
    The DWORD (32-bit) Value option
  6. Input EnableLegacyBalloonNotifications for the DWORD’s title.
  7. Double-click the new EnableLegacyBalloonNotifications DWORD to bring up a Value data box for it.
  8. Enter 1 in the Value data box, and click the OK option.
    The Edit DWORD window
  9. Click the Registry Editor window’s X (close) button.
  10. You’ll need to restart Windows for this registry tweak to take effect.

After the restart, you’ll see balloon system tray notifications pop up in Windows 11 like the one in the snapshot directly below. When a notification appears, move the cursor over the notifier to keep it up. You can click the cross on the notification to close it.

A balloon notification tooltip

If you don’t prefer the balloon tooltip, you can still restore the original toast notifications. Open the Explorer key in the Registry Editor again as outlined in steps one to four of the method above. Then right-click the EnableLegacyBalloonNotifications DWORD and select the Delete option. Or you can set that DWORD’s value to 0 instead.

How to Restore Balloon Tooltips With Winaero Tweaker

An alternative way to restore balloon tooltip notifications in Windows 11 and10 is to utilize third-party customization software that includes such an option. Look no further than the freeware Winaero Tweaker, which is packed to the rafters with handy Windows customization settings. This is how you can restore balloon tooltips with Winaero Tweaker.

  1. Open the download page for the Winaero Tweaker software.
  2. Select the Download Winaero Tweaker option on that page.
  3. Bring up the Explorer file manager by clicking the folder icon on the taskbar.
  4. Go to the folder in which you saved the ZIP archive for Winaero Tweaker.
  5. Click Winaero Tweaker’s ZIP file with the right mouse button to select Extract All.
    The Extract All option
  6. Select the Show extracted files checkbox on the extraction tool’s window.
    The Extract compressed window
  7. Click Extract to open a decompressed folder.
  8. Then double-click the setup file for Winaero Tweaker.
  9. Select the I accept the agreement and Install options within the Setup Winaero Tweaker window. You don’t need to change any of the other default installation options.
  10. To start Winaero Tweaker after installing, select the Run Winaero Tweaker checkbox. Pressing the Finish button will then launch the software.
  11. Double-click Desktop and Taskbar in Winaero Tweaker’s navigation sidebar.
  12. Select Balloon Tooltips to open the option shown directly below.
    The Enable balloon tooltips checkbox
  13. Click the Enable Balloon tooltips checkbox to select it.
  14. Press the Sign out now button that appears in Winaero Tweaker after changing the balloon tooltip option.
  15. Windows will then restart with balloon tooltip notifications restored. You can activate a balloon notifier to see what it’s like by inserting and then removing a USB storage drive from your PC.

To bring back the original toast tooltips, go back to Winaero Tweaker’s Enable Balloon tooltip option. Then click the Reset this page to defaults option for that setting. You’ll need to restart Windows to apply changes as before.

Bring Back the Balloon Tooltip Notifications in Windows 11 and 10

So, that’s how you can get the old-style balloon tooltip notification back in Windows 11 and 10. How do you like it? Some Windows traditionalists might prefer the tooltips of yesteryear to the Metro-style toast ones. Now you can choose whichever notification style you prefer.