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The Notification area (or system tray) in the Windows taskbar displays the current time and icons that indicate the active status of various components, such as the status of your network connection, Active Sync connection to your handheld device, PCMCIA cards inserted into a laptop computer, or the printer queue. In addition, icons representing various programs or processes that run in the background, such as the Language Bar for using the new Voice Recognition and Handwriting Recognition in Office XP programs, the Windows Clipboard when it contains multiple items, and the MSN Messenger Service.
This is also the place from which the Windows Update feature added to Windows XP displays the annoying Update Reminder message telling you that new updates for the system are available.
You can customize the settings for the Notification area of the taskbar by altering the settings in the Notification area section of the Taskbar tab. By default, both the Show the Clock and Hide Inactive Icons check boxes are selected. To remove the time from the Notification area, click the Show the Clock check box to remove the check mark. To display all the Notification icons even when the processes they represent are inactive, click the Hide Inactive Icons check box to remove the check mark. Note that when the Hide Inactive Icons setting is active, Windows adds a button marked with two less-than signs (an << icon) that you can click to display all the Notification icons. You can then click this button a second time, now marked with two greater than signs (an >> icon), to collapse the area and hide the inactive icons.
In addition to changing these two settings for the Notification area, you can also change the circumstances under which particular notification icons are displayed in the Notification area. To do this, click the Customize button near the bottom of the taskbar to open the Customize Notifications dialog box, as shown in Figure 1.
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Figure 1: The Customize Notifications dialog box. |
The Customize Notifications dialog box contains a list box that is divided into Current Items and Past Items sections. You can change the display status for any icon listed in either section. To do this, click the icon and then click the drop-down button that appears next to the current status (Hide when Inactive is the default setting for all of the icons). To always have the icon displayed in the Notification area, click Always Show in this pop-up menu. To never have the icon appear in this area, click Always Hide instead.
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