It made its first appearance in Windows 95, but it didn??™t take long for most
trays to get cluttered with junk from every program installed on your PC.
And since Microsoft wasn??™t too careful about establishing standards for the
icons put there, applications weren??™t too careful about giving their customers
control over those icons. As a result, many applications won??™t let you remove
their icons, and of those that do, the process is different for each one.
Microsoft snapped into action to solve the problem, and five years later
came up with the Hide inactive icons feature. To clean up your tray, rightclick
an empty area of the taskbar, select Properties, and choose the Notification
Area tab. Turn on the Hide inactive icons option, and then click
Customize to open the Customize Notification Icons window shown in
Figure 2-10.
58 | Chapter 2: Shell Tweaks
The active icons in your tray appear under Current Items, while those that
have come and gone show up further down, under Past Items. To hide an
icon, highlight it in the list, and then select Hide in the Behavior column.
Click OK when you??™re done; the change takes effect right away.
If you??™ve hidden at least one icon, a little white arrow appears to the left of
the tray (meaning that you won??™t save any space if you hide only one icon).
Just click the arrow to temporarily show hidden tray icons; move the mouse
away, and the arrow hides them again.
Tired of dealing with tray icons on a one-by-one basis? If you??™re using the
Vista Business or Ultimate edition, you can turn off the tray completely.
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