The setting: Show icon and notifications. Click the up arrow to see all your notification area icons. The Windows System Tray is something of a necessary evil. Start by clicking the small white arrow at the left edge of the System Tray. Until Windows 7 came along, it was challenging at best to control what did and didn't appear in the System Tray. Click OK, make sure that the behavior for Power, Network, and Volume are set correctly, and then click OK. Next, click Customize. A simple way of customizing and tweaking the icons from the system tray is using the customization function that comes with your Windows operating system (Windows 7 and newer). You'll see whatever system/programs icons that aren't currently configured to appear full-time in the Tray. Obviously whatever changes you make won't be permanent until you do click OK; this just gives you a chance to see what your System Tray will look like before you finalize it. You'll see a list of all the Notification Area Icons (Windows 7's term for "System Tray stuff"). Note: When you purchase something after clicking links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. If you are running Windows 7, follow these additional steps: Click Start, type Customize icons and then click Customize icons on the task bar. Next, click Customize. Control whether an icon appears on your taskbar or this tray by dragging and dropping it between the two areas. Here's how. Download Windows 7 … Here is what I wanted it to look like: I found may posts and complaints about this problem spanning XP, Vista and now Windows 7. Customize Option Notice that the change gets implemented immediately--no clicking Apply or OK required. It wasn't uncommon to see a dozen or more icons littered down there. At some point my system icons disappeared from my system tray (the little tray at the left edge of the Windows task bar). Copyright © 2020 IDG Communications, Inc. Now, however, Microsoft has finally made it easy to choose what you see. In order to do that, simply click on the small arrow on your taskbar and select the "Customize" option, as yon can see in the image below. PCWorld helps you navigate the PC ecosystem to find the products you want and the advice you need to get the job done. Read our, Learn more about PCWorld's Digital Editions. With one click it will hide and restore the system tray icons but requires system restart or log off, and if you are an expert then you can kill the explorer and start it back again to view the changes. For example, I don't want the Windows 7 Action Center icon cluttering up my Tray, but I do want to hear from it when there's an issue--so I've set it to Only show notifications. If not, try choosing a different option for any given icon. Find the icons for Power and Volume, then make sure both are set to Show icon and notifications. The date in CMOS is wrong so the cached icons aren't in date and the frozen icons are far enough out of date that they need to be refreshed - if you freeze the machine before the whole system has a chance to start up and refresh the icons then they'll go out of date. I think these are pretty self-explanatory. You'll see a list of all the Notification Area Icons (Windows 7's term for "System Tray stuff"). Click Turn system icons on or off, and then set Volume, Network, and Power System to On. It may take some fiddling, but ultimately you get to decide how your System Tray looks and acts. Most said, try this fix (a variety of suggestions)…it may or may not work. By Rick Broida, You'll probably want to experiment with different settings for different icons. On the other hand, I routinely use the Control Center 3 software that's tied to my Brother multifunction printer, so it's nice to have that icon at the ready. |. Get the idea? Also keep in mind that you will have to run it as Administrator. Windows 7 and 8 also hide icons behind the up arrow to save taskbar space. Click the pull-down menu next to any one of them and you'll see three choices: Show icon and notifications, Hide icon and notifications, and Only show notifications. The reason that you're losing icons when the battery on CMOS dies and when you freeze PCs is because the icons have a cached "life". It shows status icons for various system elements (like volume and network connections) and programs running in the background (like MozyHome and your anti-virus software). To further customize your notification area icons, click the “Customize” link behind the up arrow. PCWorld ('Bout time, Microsoft!). This tool has been developed for Windows 7 only, with the latest version making it .NET Framework independent.