Registry Hack: Hide All Icons in the Notification Area (System Tray)
Why
I like to keep my Notification Area as clean looking as possible, and this hack will remove all of those unsightly icons – it’s doesn’t actually prevent the programs from running, it only disables the actual Notification Area. [1]
What Is The “Notification Area”?
The Notification Area (sometimes called the “Task Tray”) is where programs, which are running in the background (like anti-virus), store their icons. The Notification Tray is located in the bottom right of the screen, next to the clock.
As always, please read this important information on editing the System Registry.
How To
- Hit the Windows Key+R, type regedit into the run dialog and hit OK.
- Now that you’re in the the Registry, navigate to this key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\
Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer
- Create a new DWORD value by right-clicking the right pane and click New, then DWORD Value
- Name this newly created value:
NoTrayItemsDisplay - Double-click NoTrayItemsDisplay and, in the Value Data text box, assign it this value: [2]
1
- Close the Registry and reboot your machine.
When your machine starts up again, you will see a clean Taskbar without the Notification Area!
[1] To keep your computer running efficiently, you should prevent all of these programs from actually starting up! Try these steps (programmers can be sneaky; hopefully one of these will work):
- Open each of the programs (that are running in the Notification Area) and dig through their options, looking for the “Start with Windows” option – but remember that not all of these programs will have this option.
- Looking in your computer’s Startup folder: Start-> (All) Programs -> Startup – deleting the shortcuts that you don’t want to launch at start up.
- Look in MSCOFIG (Start -> Run -> MSCONFIG). Navigate to the Startup tab and uncheck the programs that you don’t want to start up – but make sure you do a Google Search to identify what these programs are; some of them have cryptic names!
[2] A value of 0 will keep the icons displayed.
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Finally a decent windows blog,loooooove it
I have linked you
Steven
Only “decent” huh
Well its cool but how can you have the context menus without the icons
Have you notices any drop in traffic to your site recently Saman
I actually have a little, but not much - I’m getting a ton of traffic from StumbleUpon!
[...] recently wrote how to use a Registry hack to hide all icons in the Notification Area (Task Tray), and I realized that not everyone knows how to use the Notification Area in the first [...]
Nice tip, but I prefer the other way from Taskbar Properties.There are more chances of messing up with the registries. So it’s always better to use the safe way
LOL, you keep your notification area clean, but I like to display everything. I want everything in front (laziness :p), don’t want to press that arrow (Show Hidden Icons).
It’s true that editing the Registry can be dangerous, but if you concerned about security, it’s the more secure way.
Hey there,
That hack above looks almost like what I would need but it kill all the sys tray icons.
I need a registry or command line hack to remove ONLY the notifications titled “keep your computer up to date” (yellow chevron) and another for the “Windows Security Alerts” (red chevron).
Here the solution requirements:
1) I cannot do this via GUI. I can only do it by command line or registry hack. (am using a scripting utility).
2) can do it with a bat file but not a vbs script
Any ideas?
Brian
hi
great
But, how I can hide a special icon in system try
If you just want to hide an icon, check out my post: Windows Tip: Remove The My Recent Documents Icon From The Start Menu
If the specific icons in the tray you wish to remove are due to services being run, you can use “net stop” to stop it and “sc config” to disable them. Thats what I did to stop autoupdates and the security center as follows:
net stop “Automatic Updates”
sc config “wuauserv” start= disabled
net stop “Security Center”
sc config “wscsvc” start= disabled
Good luck!
B
Thanks
to: Sadeghi
I want to hide an icon in notification area just like hide all icons. not in recent document.
to: Brian
I only want to hide it. It should be enabled
I think your trick, stop the program
Ok, this may be a slightly old article, but I had a specific problem I needed to get done. What I wanted to do was have a certain program running, but make it so the icon didn’t show up in the notifications area. Basically run it like most services on windows, silently, but hidden in the background.
So for those that want to do this for whatever reason, this is what I did.
Start > Control Panel > Administrative tools > Services *
Once in services, find the program that you want to hide the icon of. Right click on it and hit Properties. It should give you a window with access to 4 tabs. (General, Log-on, Recovery, and Dependencies)
Go ahead and click on the Log-on tab. Now un-tick the box that says “Allow service to interact with desktop” Hit apply, then restart the computer.
Now when your computer starts up, the program’s icon is no longer in the notification area. In fact, the only way to know its running is by checking the Windows task manager processes. In which it will be there, running silently in the background.
Tags: edit notification icons, notification icons, hide icons, hide notification icons, windows icons, remove windows icons, remove notification icons, remove icons
hi man
great solution.
i was searching the net hours for that solution.
need to emphasize what is solves:
You can hide a specific icon from the system tray, but let its software continue running in background.
Btw, you don’t have to restart your computer in the end.
You can just right click–> Stop
right click –> Start
and the icon will not appear anymore
yes it does stop it. We do automated updates ourselves but NOT using windows after patches are tested. So we turn off the windows service and deploy using another tool. That way users cannot prematurely deploy just because Bill Gates tells them to.
Best way to hide it = make it not there
.
Sorry if it doesn’t help your scenario.
Brian
I still cant hide my notification area…. why..?
hi,
please help me.
I want to start blue tooth icon in the system tray among all the tray icons appears ,
ie , i want to change the sequence the icons are getting loaded in the system tray……
any 1 please help me as soon as possible and
thanks in advance,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
Good info…but, not quite what I need (alter the *Services* info in Administrative Tools)..the program that I have running is a small installed program that runs constantly in the background but doesn’t appear in *Services*….where in the Registry would one look to remove the system tray icon entry without disrupting the program itself?
Thanks!!