Controlling the Toolbar and Taskbar in Vista - Controlling the System Tray
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Look to the lower-right side of the taskbar (unless you’ve moved the taskbar location). There, among other items, you’ll see the system clock, the volume indicator, and maybe a battery indicator on a laptop machine. There’s a name for this taskbar section as well. The flotilla of icons you see there is called the System Tray, also known as the Notification Area (presumably because Vista, like Windows XP, has a habit of displaying little balloon notifications from this area).
The System Tray is populated by icons that indicate applications, or at least certain application components, that were loaded at startup. Hovering the mouse pointer over one of these icons should produce a little ScreenTip that lets you know the purpose of the icon.
To manipulate application behavior, just right-click the desired application icon. For example, you can adjust sound properties by right-clicking the speaker icon and choosing the appropriate action (if you want to turn the volume up or down, try the Volume Mixer).
Several other programs, such as Windows Live Messenger, also load at startup time and place an icon in the System Tray. By right-clicking on the System Tray icon, you can usually either open the program itself or get quick access to a properties dialog box where you can tweak startup behavior. In the case of Windows Live Messenger, you can open the application, and then access an Options dialog box from the Tools menu where you can tell the application not to load every time Vista starts up (see Figure 4-15).
Figure 4-15. Controlling application startup behavior via the System Tray
Why is all this important? Because each background application that shows in the System Tray is also using at least some system resources. Governing which applications load in the background can be an important part of tuning startup and shutdown performance (open applications close during a normal shutdown), and the System Tray is a great indicator.
Just because an application loads at startup time doesn’t necessarily mean it also places a corresponding icon in the System Tray. To get a better handle on what programs load during system startup, use the Msconfig utility (msconfig.exe). I discuss the Msconfig utility in Chapter 6.
There are a couple of ways to manage what happens in the System Tray. One is to change the properties of the application so that it doesn’t load and place an icon there in the first place. But we just discussed that. For icons that aren’t necessarily applications that load, such as the system clock, you can also change the behavior of the System Tray, which we’ll discuss next.
Changing System Tray Behavior
To change the general behavior of the System Tray, you can access the Notification Area tab in the Taskbar and Start Menu Properties dialog box. If you’ve been reading this chapter, you already know how to get there. If not, follow these steps:
- Right-click the Start button or an empty area of the taskbar and choose Properties.
- The Taskbar and Start Menu Properties dialog box appears. Make sure the Notification Area tab is chosen.
- As seen in Figure 4-16, there are a couple of options here that determine general System Tray activity.
Figure 4-16. Configuring System Tray behavior
You can turn off icons for the volume, clock, power, and network by unchecking the appropriate checkboxes in the “System icons” section of the Notification Area screen.
The big one here is the default setting to “Hide inactive icons.” Checking this box (or, more technically, leaving it checked) hides most of the System Tray icons behind a little arrow button. Clicking this arrow button expands the full list of System Tray icons. Unchecking this box can have a significant effect on the usable space available to the rest of the taskbar.
For additional manipulation of just the system clock, you can right-click an empty area of the System Tray (or the time reading) and choose Adjust Date and Time. The Date and Time dialog box opens. Use the Additional Clocks tab to configure more options.
In this same dialog box, you may have also noticed a Customize button, discussed in the following section.
Please check back next week for the continuation of this article.
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 This article is excerpted from chapter four of Windows Vista Administration: The Definitive Guide, written by Brian Culp (O'Reilly; ISBN: 0596529597). Check it out today at your favorite bookstore. Buy this book now.
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