R.I.P. Windows System Tray

If you know me, you know I use Linux whenever possible. But I still have to keep a Windows virtual machine around to do things for work.

I can't stand when a computer slows down or freezes for a few seconds. Usually its some useless piece of software or system service running in the background. I go out of my way and use all kinds of specialized diagnostic tools to kill "features" like these.

So as you can imagine, I don't have much in the system tray. A volume icon and a network status symbol is really all I need.

What happened to the system tray? A lot of programs used to put icons there, but I never had trouble killing them. I guess some people did though because M$ made this new way to hide icons in the tray.

Go ahead. Do a google search for how to remove ANY tray icon. You'll find a thousand eager nerds explaining how to hide the icon. Screw hiding them! The point is I don't want their extra resource demands on my system. Nobody has ever thanked a forum member for telling them how to hide their icons.

So look what M$ has done now. In previous versions of Office you could turn off the Outlook tray icon. But not any more. That's not even consistent. You can turn off the Onenote icon.

So the time has come. The system tray has out-lived its usefulness. Now its only a bother. I have no other choice. The best solution now is to just edit the system registry to completely disable the system tray altogether.

Bye bye system tray!

Now if I could only disable the start button like we could in XP.

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This blog entry typed entirely... and painfully slowly... on a dvorak.