How to Enable or Disable Low Disk Space Message

Do pop up notification balloons annoy you?  Some of these pop up balloons include notifications for low disk space.  Since these may pop up rather frequently, this registry tweak for Windows XP may be of help to you.

Low Disk Space messages will appear when:

  • Your free disk space reaches 200MB.  When this happens, you will receive this message once per session for 10 seconds: You are running out of disk space on [drive]. To free space on this drive by deleting old or unnecessary files, click here.
  • Your free disk space reaches 80MB.  Notification messages will pop up for 30 seconds, once every four hours, twice per session.  The warning you will receive will look like this: You are running very low on disk space on [drive]. To free space on this drive by deleting old or unnecessary files, click here.
  • Your free disk space reaches 50MB.  This time, notification messages will appear for 30 seconds, every 5 minutes, until free disk space increases to more than 50MB.

If you’d rather not receive any such messages, you can disable them.  If you’re confident that you won’t ever need them, go ahead and disable them.  If they’d only annoy you, get rid of them.

This is how you can perform this tweak.

  1. Click on Start and go to Run.  Enter regedit.
  2. Locate HKEY_CURRENT_USER on the left side.  Expand this folder.
  3. Go to the Software folder and expand.
  4. Look for the Microsoft folder.  Expand the folder to get to Windows.
  5. Under Windows, go to CurrentVersion.
  6. Proceed to Policies.  Expand Policies and go to Explorer.
  7. Look at the right hand side of the box.  Check and see if DWORD value NoLowDiskSpaceChecks is present.  If the value is listed, proceed to step eight. If the value is not listed, perform the steps below:

    – Right click on the right hand pane of the box.
    – Select New and then select DWORD.
    – Rename the DWORD entry as NoLowDiskSpaceChecks.  You can also right click on the new DWORD value and choose Rename.

  8. Double click NoLowDiskSpaceChecks.  Enter 0 to disable Low Disk Space Messages.  If you want to enable Low Disk Space Messages, enter 1.
  9. Exit registry and reboot.