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DADDY BOB'S COMPUTER Q & A
November 22, 2009
Q.
How do I stop the icons in the system tray
from being hidden? Every time I try to see
what is there, they disappear too quickly.
A.
This is pretty easy to do in XP, but very
limited in what can be done; a little more
complicated in Vista, but just about as
limited; and In Windows 7, pretty
straight forward to implement, with much
more user control. Windows Vista and 7 allow
you to turn off the "system" icons like the
clock, Volume, Power for laptops, and the
new Action Center all in one location.
XP
In XP, right click the taskbar and
choose Properties. To have all the
current icons displayed in the system tray,
just uncheck the box in front of "Hide
inactive icons". If you want to be more
selective, click the customize button. Note
that this button is only active when the
Hide inactive icons box is checked. A
list is displayed with two sections, Current
icons and Past icons. Each of these icons
can be set to Hide when active, Always hide
or Always show.
VISTA
In Vista, right click the taskbar, choose
properties then the Notification tab. In
this dialog, you can choose which system
icons to display, and also customize the
other icons similar to the way it is done in
XP.
Windows 7
In Win 7, right click the taskbar and choose
Properties. In the middle of this dialog, is
the Notification section, and the Customize
button. Clicking it displays a list of all
current and past icons in one list. To show
all icons in the system tray, scroll to the
bottom of this window and check "Always show
all icons and notifications on the taskbar."
For more options uncheck this box and each
item becomes independently changeable with
three options. These are Show icons and
notifications, Hide icons and notifications
and Only show notification.
Near the
bottom of the window is the option to Turn
system icons on or off which opens another
window when clicked where you can set them
individually. Also, if you are unhappy with
any changes that you have made, there is an
option to Restore default icon behaviors.
This returns them to their settings when
Windows 7 was installed.
If the
computer has been used for some time and
many icons have been displayed and removed,
the Past icons section in XP and Vista can
become quite long. In Win 7, the past icons
are still shown, just not in a separate
section. Should all these past icons being
displayed be undesirable or bothersome to
you, they can be easily removed. However,
this requires a registry modification.
Actually,
it requires a couple of deletions and what
is deleted is different for the different
versions of Windows. So, to make this
easier, I have written a little program that
will do it for you. It is called "ClearPastList.exe"
and can be downloaded from the download
section of this site or by clicking
HERE.
It works on XP, Vista and Win 7. The
deletion only becomes apparent after Windows
Explorer has been closed and restarted.
Instructions to do this are given when the
program completes. The choice to reboot is
also given which will accomplish the same
thing. |
