Is Your Windows Clock Messy and Cluttered?
If you look at the bottom, right-hand side of your screen (next to the clock), you’ll probably see some icons. Some, if not most of the icons there are of no interest to you and you will want to remove them. Some icons, like the speaker icon for example probably should stay there for easy access, but other icons can be safely removed. Before you begin cleaning up all these messy icons, be sure you identify which icons you want to remove and which icons you want to keep. After all, you don’t want to disable required programs like your anti-virus by mistake.
Start by right-clicking on the icon you have selected for removal. A pop-up menu will appear, and one of your options should be something like ’settings’ or ‘options’ or even ‘configure’. If so, left click on it and look for the word ‘icon’ or ’systray’ in the options box that comes up. Many programs, if written well will give you the option to remove the icon from the systray and that’s the key here.
The clock icon, speaker icon, USB icon and so on all reside in the System Tray which is more commonly know as the systray – that’s good to know in general so don’t forget it. So more advanced programs will give you many more options with the icon such as displaying in the taskbar or systray or both or neither and so on, so do not be afraid to look around the properties or setting of any program that currently resides in your Windows systray.
A great example of an icon that can be removed from the clock is QuickTime since most computers have it. Look for a big blue Q next to your clock. If it’s there, right click on it, select ‘properties’ and then, at the bottom of the box that pops up, you will see an option to remove the icon, voila you are done. Windows 7 offers even more advanced options to add and remove icons from both the systray and the taskbar. The functions are the same, but Windows 7 uses a fancy new name as they call it ‘pin’ and ‘unpin’ as in pin this program to the taskbar or unpin this program from the taskbar.
When used properly, you can clean up and customize Windows to look and operate just the way you want or need it to.
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