It’s quite easy to control yourself what icons stay in the main notification area. You can also search for taskbar settings from the start menu. You can carry out a Registry tweak or use freeware to delete or clear past icons in the system tray or notification area. Taking the manual removal a step further, it’s easy to use a simple batch script to delete the two registry values. Remove The Notification Icons Via The Registry. The hidden icons are shown when you press the up arrow to the far left. For a brief period, the taskbar and your desktop icons are going to disappear. When you click on that you have a window as in the following picture. None of the other methods suggested here or elsewhere (even by Microsoft) worked. Just run the program and press the Clean button and it will go through the process of clearing the necessary registry entries. To show or hide system icon, typically, in Windows 10, you have to open Settings > Personalization > Taskbar and click on Turn system icons on or off link… Thanks for the excellent BAT file. To do it yourself, open Regedit from Start or the Run dialog (Win+R) and navigate to the following key. Click Run Cleaner to clear the cache. To do it via Task Manager, end the Explorer.exe process and go to File > New Task (Run…) and type Explorer into the Open box. But this only hides but does not remove the icons. Step 3 . You can clear or remove past or old icons from the notification area or system tray in Windows 10/8/7 by following the procedure laid down in this post. The Notification area section contains the two options which we are looking for. Restart your explorer.exe process or your Windows computer. If you have CCleaner installed on your system, there will be no need to use anything else for the task. In Windows 7 you have the option to show the icons and notifications permanently, hide them and don’t show any notifications, or only show notification popups when they appear. 6. Tray Cleaner 2. Removing old Windows notification icons Press [Windows R], type [regedit] and hit [enter]. In Windows 7/8, to remove an icon from the notification area, you open Taskbar and Start Menu Properties > Appearance and Personalization > Taskbar and Start Menu. A useful feature is the program will backup the TrayIcons registry key where the necessary values are stored. The clean button will be whited out if there is nothing to clean, which probably means you have deleted the cache without restarting Explorer afterwards. Either kill and restart Explorer.exe from Task Manager or use this simple Restart Explorer batch script. Your email address will not be published. After install, right click the tray icon for the program and select “Display info for tray icons only”. The explorer.exe process restarts, and the notification area icon cache is cleared. Tray Cleaner 2 is a very simple and portable tool that only has three buttons on its … In actual fact, one of the most popular system and junk cleaning tools of all time has an option built in to clear the notification area cache. Introduction Step 1 . Weirdly, it doesn’t restart Explorer automatically or even warn that you need to manually restart it for the changes to take effect. Alternatively download the Restart Explorer batch script which will do it for you. This opens the Taskbar Settings screen. number 6 worked well ! Click the Turn system icons on or off option to turn System icons on or off. Windows may not remove the program icon of the uninstalled program icon from Notification Area Icons Control Panel applet. In this way the icon will remain added to the bar until we decide to remove it. Required fields are marked *, 6 Ways To Remove Unused Icons from the Notification Area, Hide or Remove “Safely Remove Hardware” Tray Icon, 7 Ways to Detect And Remove Old, Unused or Hidden Device Drivers, 4 Ways to Safely Delete Unused MSI and MSP Files from Windows Installer Folder, 4 Ways to Find Out What Programs are Running in the Windows System Tray, 6 Ways to Safely Remove Windows XP Update Backup Files to Free Up Hard Disk Space. We’ve already created a simple script that will ask if you want to backup the TrayNotify key to the desktop, then delete the values and finally ask if you want to restart Explorer to complete the process. In the security warning dialog, click Run. Alternatively, you can also use freeware CCleaner to do the job easily. I spent a lot of time trying before I found your BAT file. The tools above do the same thing which is delete the required registry values. Here you can choose to hide the notification area icons that you do not wish to see. On checking the box a dialog will popup telling you Explorer needs to be restarted manually. System Tray Cleaner is a program we have mentioned before because it’s quite useful to identify icons in your tray that don’t have a visible name. Then Explorer is restarted which you need to do to complete the removal. i’ve been trying different methods for days with no luck & this worked perfectly. Although those redundant icons won’t appear in either the main or hidden notification areas, it’s recommended to remove them if there a number of unused entries. Click Select which icons appears on the taskbar option to hide or show icons. Anand Khanse is the Admin of TheWindowsClub.com, a 10-year Microsoft MVP Awardee in Windows (2006-16) & a Windows Insider MVP since then. When the page listing your current tray icons appears, simply press the Restore Default Tray Settings button. Please read the entire post & the comments first, create a System Restore Point before making any changes to your system & be careful about any 3rd-party offers while installing freeware. Running the Notification Area Cleaner. Download this PC Repair Tool to quickly find & fix Windows errors automatically, Download PC Repair Tool to quickly find & fix Windows errors automatically. The notification area or the system tray is located on the right side of the Windows taskbar. Tray Cleaner 2 is a very simple and portable tool that only has three buttons on its user interface, Clean, Exit and About. The program is portable and not much more than 100KB in size with separate 32-bit and 64-bit versions. Millions of Windows 7 users prone to critical security vulnerability! Go to the Start menu then open the Control Panel in the icon view mode. Many times, even when you uninstall a program, the icon for that program remains, although it may or may not get displayed. The option can also be added to terminate and restart the Explorer process so it behaves pretty much the same as the third party utilities. To show or hide system icon, typically, in Windows 10, you have to open Settings > Personalization > Taskbar and click on Turn system icons on or off link. On launch, Tray Cleaner will tell you if there are any entries to clean or not. The main difference is the batch script uses only built in Windows commands. They just make it easier and more comfortable from a user interface. Although it may be a bit overkill to just delete the redundant icons from the tray, System Tray Cleaner becomes quite valuable if you want to do both that and check any icons you are not sure about at the same time. Simply right click on the clock and select “Customize notification icons”. Navigate to the Registry key HKCU \Software \Classes \LocalSettings \Software \Microsoft \Windows \CurrentVersion... Make a backup of the Registry key … Having a utility program like this is great although the result was the similar and the notification area required that all icons had to be hidden again if that was your prefrence, although this is a little different as the taskbars differ…, you do a fantasic job on the blogs and they are very much appreciated as many like myself will be staying with win 7, Your email address will not be published. The Windows notification area, also known as the system tray, shows the system clock and other important icons such as network and audio volume by default. After receiving the warning that Explorer will be restarted, the icons that are not currently attached to a running program will be cleared. Confirm the UAC prompt if it is displayed. After a few seconds, everything is back to normal. In the panel which opens up, you can toggle the switch to show or hide the system icons. In the right pane find the value Name of IconStreams, right click and delete it. Here are 6 ways in which you can do it. The simplest way that we find to anchor an icon to the Taskbar is by selecting with the mouse pointer, keeping it pressed and then dragging it to the bar where we will drop it. For safety, backup the key first by right clicking on TrayNotify and selecting Export, then give the backed up .REG file a name.