How to Disable Windows 8.1 Help Tips

Last Updated on October 30, 2013

Windows 8.1 has some snazzy new help tips in the form of giant orange arrows. If you’re not digging the giant helping hand, here are the instructions for getting rid of them.

Windows 8.1 has a revamped version of the first Windows 8 UI, and this time around it comes with giant help tips that are sort of helpful, but also super annoying. If you’re a Windows 8 pro then you don’t need them. The good news is these tips will naturally go away once you follow them, but why bother when you can just disable them. Let’s go through and look at two different methods of turning them off without having to complete them.

The first thing we need to do is open up the Group Policy Editor. To do this press Windows Key + R to open the Run dialog. Type gpedit.msc into the Open box and then click OK.

In the Policy Editor browse to:

User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Edge UI

Double-click on the setting labeled Disable help tips.

This is where it seems a little backward. To disable help tips here, we’re actually going to tick the Enabled bullet from the list. We’re enabling the function to disable it, if that makes sense. Click OK save changes and exit.

In the Registry

If you are on a system that doesn’t have the Group Policy Editor enabled, there are two registry DWORDs that can be changed to enable or disable the feature. These are located at:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\EdgeUI
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\EdgeUI

Alternatively if you don’t feel like going through the registry to fix these, here are two premade .reg files that you can just open up to apply the change.

3 Comments

Ans
Where on the keyboard is the “key” button? There is nothing on my keyboard at all with “key” on it.
Reply
- Steve Krause
  HI Ans — It’s the “Windows Key” button on the keyboard.
  Hope that helps!
  -S
  Reply
  - Paul Barfoot
    07-05-15 2:14 est
    Dear Mr. Krause,
    First, hoping you had a great 4h of July.
    Thought I should rely this info regarding your cure
    for stopping Windows help tip from incessant pop up.
    Followed exactly as you so kindly made available
    however,so far, Note Pad ( notepad.exe still pops up
    when using it.
    This exercise alerted me to the fact my version of Windows 8.1 x64
    did not have the policy editor. so I upgraded to Pro version on the 4th.
    which, in hind sighty, I should have done from the get go.
    Kind regards,
    Paul Barfoot
    Waterloo, ON Canada
    Reply