My HP Spectre x360 13 inch from late 2017 has an annoying problem where it shows a popup message when connected to a non-HP power adapter. The message says “HP recommends using an original power adapter from HP”. After searching around the web, it seems I’m not alone. I read the thread about disabling USB-C popups completely here, however I wanted to continue to get the popup box for the other messages such as “For full performance, connect a higher power adapter” and “The AC adapter is not compatible with this system”.
I did some digging with procmon and found that HPMSGSVC.exe looks at a registry key to see what application it should run for each event. It appears that the annoying message is caused by the “2304” event. As a quick fix, you can simply tell it to use a program that doesn’t exist for the “2304” event. See the instructions below for a simple way to do just that.
- Run regedit
- Navigate to Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\HP\HP System Event\WMIEvent20001\2304\
- Modify ApplicationPath key
- Add .disable to end of path (mine now looks like %PROGRAMFILES%\HP\HP System Event\USBCMSG.exe.disable)
- Enjoy not seeing the annoying popup all the time
I’ve experimented with changing the ApplicationKey path to another program of my choice and it seems to work. I even wrote some applications to popup my own message for each event, and I’ve been experimenting with displaying the messages through Windows 10 native notifications. If there’s interest, I’ll post the source code on Github.