What is Windows Notification Area in Windows XP Toolbar ?
In Windows XP, the system tray is known as “Notification Area”. If your task bar is at the bottom of the screen, then the technically right bottom corner will be the ‘Notification Area’.
A lot of windows programs and processes will place it’s icon in this area as they mostly will be required immediately. Some of the most common icons found in that area are Network Connection Status indicator, anti virus software, USB drives plugged in (if any), firewall activity and more.
As more applications start adding their icons to this ‘Notification Area’, it starts to get cluttered and starts taking significant portion of your Windows task bar. When the number of icons exceed predefined number of icons, an automatic slider comes in picture which starts hiding less used icons and shows most used icons. The hidden icons can be seen by expanding the slider by clicking the arrow mark.
A better approach is to always hide some of the icons which are not used regularly as it’ll free up space, make things clear and also will present to you only the icons which are useful to you and often used by you.
The procedure to always hide the icons, in the system tray or notification area is as follows:
1> Right-click the Notification Area and select “Properties“.
2> The Taskbar Tab opens, you’ll find a checkbox labeled “Hide Inactive Icons“, checking this option will hide the inactive icons.
3> Next to this checkbox, you’ll find a button labeled ‘Customize‘, clicking on it opens ‘Customize Notification‘ box.
4> Select the item from the list in the box and in the right and select ‘Always Hide‘, ‘Always Show‘ or ‘Hide When inactive‘ option depending on your preference.
5> Click on ‘OK‘ and then ‘Apply‘.
This will give you the freedom to choose what you wish to keep in the ‘Notification Area‘ and what you want to hide permanently.
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