System Tray is the place where you will find icons for the startup items and system functions such as battery status, network status, antivirus, sound etc. Let’s say these are the essential features or icons to be there. But how about System Try icons for your chat programs, VoIP applications or other applications. Windows 7 system tray is very much customizable than the previous versions of Windows Operating system. The easy drag and drop option on the system tray will let you hide all the unwanted icons from the system tray. Even changing the order of the icons are possible. Removing items from system tray will be a five minute task but it can take hours to sort out what is required on the tray and what should hit the recycle bin when you plan to fine tune your start-up items.
A regular system tray will look like this!
The drag and drop feature in Windows 7 will let you hide the unused icons in one place and keep your system tray looks neat and clean.
In Windows 7 they have separated the system icons from the regular system tray notifications and you can manage it in your own way and change the behavior to ON or OFF.
Click on the Customize-> Click on Turn System Icons on or off there you can change the behavior for system icons.
But I would always suggest you to get rid of such unwanted start-up items from loading in start-up which will make your computer start-up faster. You can use MSCONFIG feature in windows to disable the unused applications from the start-up.
Go to Run and Type in MSconfing to launch the System Configuration feature.
You can navigate to Start-up tab and see what is relevant by looking at the manufacturer tab. Uncheck those entries which you find as irrelevant then click on OK to restart the PC to apply the settings. (Any time you can revert back to the default settings by selecting the entries you unselected.)
