I have a friend owns an Internet cafe who and for some reason his customers love to tweak the system tray. He already had the computers logged in as a restricted guest account, but he wanted to completely disable the system tray to prevent “savvy” customers from accessing the shortcuts from the tray.
Well, I ended up showing him how to do this using our good old “regedit” tool. Below are the steps that I shared with my friend.
· Click start and type REGEDIT in the search bar and hit enter to launch the registry editor window.
· In the registry editor window navigate to
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer.
· Right click on the explorer key and select NEW then DWORD (32-bit) Value.
· Rename the new DWORD (32-bit) Value to NoTrayItemsDisplay. Double click on NoTrayItemsDisplay and type 1 in the for Value data and click OK.
· Close the registry editor window and log-off your pc and then log-on again to make the changes take effect. After you log-on you will see that the system tray is already disabled. See the example below where only the timer is displayed on the lower right corner of the screen. The system tray icons are gone!
· To enable the system tray again you can just delete the NoTrayItemsDisplay key or change the value data of NoTrayItemsDisplay to 0. Below is an example of a system with the system tray enabled:
Ben Carigtan shows you how it’s done.
HelpDesk,
I have tried that in Windows XP and it works great, but Windows Vista is totally different. The tweak doesn’t work for Windows Vista. Please try it on Vista thank,….. If you could tell me a solution, I would certainly appreciate it!!