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system-tray posts

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware

TrayEverything minimizes any app to the Windows sysem tray

Windowsby Brad Linder Oct 10th 2008

TrayEverything
You can clear up space on a Windows desktop by minimizing applications you're not currently looking at to the taskbar. But what happens when the taskbar is so overrun with programs that you can't make heads or tales of it? Wouldn't it be nice if you could just minimize your applications to the system tray? TrayEverything is a Windows utility that lets you do just that.

Just download and install (or download the no-install ZIP version) of TrayEverything and run it. You'll see a list of running applications. Right click on any program you want to minimize to the system tray and it will disappear from the desktop and Windows taskbar. In the system tray you'll see a small icon representing the program. Just click that icon to bring the program back up.

Note that TrayEverything needs to be run each time you want to minimize an application to the system tray. Once it's restored, clicking the program's minimize button will send it to the taskbar, not the system tray. If you're looking for a more permanent solution, you might want to check out Trayconizer, a command line utility that you can add to any program shortcut in order to automatically minimize it to the system tray whenever you hit the minimize button.

[via gHacks]

Tags: system-tray, taskbar, trayconizer, trayeverything

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware

How to add Windows tray icons for the trash bin, disc drive, and power

Windowsby Brad Linder Jul 9th 2008

MinibinIt only takes a few clicks to do things like empty your Windows recycling bin, reboot your PC or open your CD-ROM drive. But if you're looking for easy access to these features, why not add system tray icons that give you two-click access no matter what you're doing with your computer?

E-sushi has a series of utilities that add these features to your system tray. Disc Tray Toggler lets you open and close your disc drive through a right-click context menu. MiniBin lets you open or empty your recycle bin. And iPower lets you logoff, shutdown, or reboot your PC.

The company also has a couple of other useful utilities including MyKeyGen, a password generator, and TimeBomb, a tool that lets you shutdown, logoff, or reboot your system after a specified periord of time. There's also a program called RunIdleTasks that's designed to force any tasks that normally run when your PC is idle to run immediately. But to be honest, we had a hard time figuring out if RunIdleTasks was doing anything when we took it for a test drive.

[via Shell Extension City]

Tags: disc-tray-toggler, e-sushi, ipower, logoff, minibin, power, reboot, recycling-bin, shutdown, system-tray

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware

Minimize anything to the Windows system tray with Trayconizer

Windowsby Brad Linder Jun 15th 2008

Trayconizer
Trayconizer is a little application that lets you change the behavior of any Windows program so that it can be minimized to the system tray instead of the taskbar. You'll have to configure each application manually, because Trayconizer is designed to be inserted into a program shortcut.

Here's how it works. You unzip Trayconizer to a folder on your PC. Let's say it's C:\Trayconizer. Now all you have to do is insert Trayconizer into the target field of a program shortcut. For example if you want to be able to minimize Firefox to the system tray, you would right-click on the shortcut for Firefox and insert the path to Trayconizer.exe before the path to Firefox.exe. It should read something like

"c:\trayconizer\trayconizer.exe" c:program files\mozilla\firefox.exe

You can also use XNeat, a program we covered a while back, to minimize running programs to the system tray. But Trayconizer has the advantage of running automatically every time you launch a program so that all you have to do is click the minimize button.

[via Freeware Genius]

Tags: minimize, system-tray, trayconizer

Filed under: Windows

How to disable the Windows system tray

Windowsby Brad Linder Feb 15th 2008

System Tray
The Windows System tray has been with us for years. And while it's great to have quick access to some of your running programs through a tiny icon, once you've got a dozen or so of those icons running, the system tray can seriously eat into your Windows Taskbar space. Fortunately, Windows XP and Vista can dynamically resize the system tray to hide icons you're not currently using. But if you'd rather get rid of system tray altogether, here are the steps to do it (courtesy of the How-To Geek):
  1. Open the run programs dialog box (either by hitting Win+R or finding the Run icon in the Windows Start Menu)
  2. Type "regedit" to open the Windows Registry Editor
  3. Find this section: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer
  4. Create a new DWORD Value by right-clicking and selecting new DWORD or clicking Edit, then New, then DWORD
  5. Name your DWORD Value NoTrayItemsDisplay
  6. Set the value to 1
That's it. Next time you log out of Windows or reboot your system tray should be gone. All of your programs will continue to run, but you won't see any icons at the bottom right of your screen.

You can restore your system tray either by changing the value to 0 or by deleting the entry. On some systems, the entry may show up in more than one place so if at first you don't succeed, make sure to search your registry for "NoTrayItemsDisplay" to make sure you've deleted every instance.

Tags: regedit, registry-hack, system-tray, tweak

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