Useless System Tray Icons
Feb 22nd, 2006 by Alex
The system tray in Windows takes up valuable space on the screen, especially when the icons in the tray provide no benefit to the user. The icon for Marimba Tuner is one of the useless ones.
The system tray has always been an overly utilized area and tends to get cluttered after a few software installations. Software vendors would love to keep their icon or logo in direct view of the user at all times and the system tray seems to be the way to do it in Windows. Dell is notorious for placing all sorts of system tray icons.
While Microsoft has authored an article entitled How to Remove Items from the System Tray in Windows 2000, some of the fixes aren’t practical when you don’t have administrative privileges on the system.
Tray icons aren’t necessarily a bad thing if the icon is useful. For example, Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition keeps an icon in the tray. Double click to get general information about the quarantine area, program versions, virus definition file, as well as easy access to run LiveUpdate. Right click to disable File System Realtime Protection or get to the main menu. Anti-virus software is important and many times the user will want the assurance that it is running properly, even if they don’t have access to mess with the settings.
Marimba Tuner is used for patch management in enterprise environments and is a wonderful example of a horrible icon. To a user without administrative privileges, the only thing accessible from the icon is an About window which displays the version information for Tuner. To a user with more privileges it may display more; but if the program is capable of making that distinction, why display the icon to a regular user at all? The only reason I can think of is for enterprise administrators to get version information from a user if/when the Tuner software is misbehaving on the user’s workstation. It would save the administrator from walking the user through command line steps or being in front of the workstation themselves.
To me, that’s not worth cluttering up my system tray. I’d rather have the space.
![[del.icio.us]](http://www.moundalexis.com/images/delicious.png){kind=small}