If you want to turn off the descriptions that poppup when you place the cursor above desktop icons or Explorer objects, you can use the following registy hack: . Navigate to [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion \Explorer\Advanced] and look for the data key "ShowInfoTip" and set its value to 0 to disable it. In future if you want to enable it again, simply change it back to 1 .