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If you go into settings > Ease of Access in Windows 10, you can adjust the duration of time for which notifications appear in the bottom left hand corner of your screen. The minimum duration there is 5 seconds.

If you go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Accessibility in the registry editor, you can manually adjust the "MessageDuration" entry to be whatever you like. However, as far as I can tell (and from what I've seen in articles online), Windows 10 will continue to show notifications for 5 seconds if that entry is set to anything less than 5. It works fine if you choose any number of seconds above 5.

My question is, how can I get Windows 10 to acknowledge my desire to have a notification duration of 2 or 3 seconds? It's maddening that the Windows 10 devs think they know better than someone who is capable of registry edits (Not that that's a challenging task, but that it shows I'm not an inept computer user).

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    Any luck finding the answer yet? this is driving me insane when I am trying to work. If I touch the volume control that screen becomes useless for 5 seconds and I have to break my concentration when carefully moving my mouse to another monitor incase I pass the giant notification and start the time again!
    – Hicsy
    Commented May 11, 2020 at 11:16
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    @Hicsy No luck yet, I gave up. Hoping one day a hero will swoop in with an answer.
    – Brettyoke49
    Commented May 13, 2020 at 0:48
  • Have you tried to tinker (at your own risk...) in \HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Accessibility\ATs\messageduration ?
    – user1019780
    Commented May 14, 2020 at 7:38
  • @Didier Sorry for the late reply; I do not have "Accessibility" as an option at the path you described. Seemed like a good guess though.
    – Brettyoke49
    Commented May 28, 2020 at 23:17
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    Only thing you can do on newer windows versions is to remove the visual notification entirely.
    – LuckyLuke Skywalker
    Commented Oct 22, 2023 at 15:43

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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I was also trying to do this and found this thread.

Unfortunately, bcdedit /timeout 3 does not work, it is for editing the bootmenu timeout and has nothing to do with notifications, as stated here by microsoft https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/devtest/bcdedit--timeout.

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    As it’s currently written, your answer is unclear. Please edit to add additional details that will help others understand how this addresses the question asked. You can find more information on how to write good answers in the help center.
    – Community Bot
    Commented Mar 27, 2023 at 15:48
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For anyone that needs "zero seconds" (= never show notifications):

Open settings, search for "focus assist". Choose: "alarms only". No more annoying notifications! You can also set some automatic rules for turning on or off the notifications.

Focus Assist

While the focus assist is on, you can still click on the far end of the task bar, and any "missed out" notifications will show up as a list.

far end of taskbar

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