Cleaning task bar

[Jerrb]

As you can tell by this question I am new to the computer world... I would like to get rid of the little icons in my task bar located at the bottom right hand side of my dest top... Same area as my volume control... Help... and Thanks in advance...

 

[TonyKlein]

They all belong to programs that start up automatically as Windows loads.

If you go to Start/run, and type Msconfig, you see almost all of them (including the ones in your System Tray) on the Startup tab, which is where you can stop most of them from starting up as well.

You can't just uncheck all of them, for some of them are vital to Windows.
Take a look at this site for some more info: <A HREF="http://www.pacs-portal.co.uk/startup_content.htm">startup_content</A>

If in doubt, please post back.

And as for your little speaker, go to Control Panel/Multimedia, and uncheck 'Show Volume Control on the Taskbar'.

Good luck,

 

[SavvyLady]

hello
those icons are programs that are running now. They loaded when you rebooted cause they are in the startup menu.
We can remove them & other things as well that you don't see the icon for that is running as well. The need to do this is to reserve your resources.

So click start/ then Run.. type in msinfo32..click ok
go to software envirement & click the +
then go to startup and click it
after it loads on the right... go to Edit at the top... click to open & then click select all
then go back to Edit & click copy
come back and paste it in here

 

[SavvyLady]

either way... Tony & I are talking about the same thing

 

[Gnosisless]

Tony and Savvy have you on the right track to remove smaller programs which don't have obvious options to change, or which might be dangerous to remove, but I thought if you were just having a problem with an office suite, this might be the fast track to fix the problem.

If you have an office suite like Microsoft Office or Lotus SmartSuite installed, they put about 342 icons in the tray. Seems they may irritate you as much as they do me. You can turn these particular icons off in the individual program settings.

Many programs in the tray will allow you to do this by RIGHT CLICKING on the icon in the tray, and selecting Startup Options, Preferences, or something similar. Critical Windows files will not give you this option.

If right clicking doesn't present an option, start the program you want rid of in the tray and find the Preferences or Options section, and set it not to load on startup.

Keep in mind that some automatic features won't work if you do this, and it might make some programs take longer to load. Direct CD from Easy CD Creator, for example, won't let you read CD RWs automatically if you don't let it run at startup.

On the other hand, the fewer things that start, the more RAM you will have available and the less likely you will be to have conflicts.

Never disable your virus scanner from running at startup unless you have a VERY good reason to (and don't leave it disabled for long if you do).

Hope this helps!