How to minimize any taskbar application to the system tray

Posted on December 21, 2007 at 6:54 am

Are you running too many applications at once? Are they taking up too much space on your Windows Taskbar? It would be nice if a lot of those applications could be minimized to the system tray and thereby save lots of space! And moving certain applications to the system tray would also be good if you’re running 10 instances of IE, which end up being grouped together on the taskbar.

Instead of minimizing 10 IE windows to the system tray, you can minimize other applications where only one instance will be running and then allow other applications like IE to take up the taskbar (just as a note though, this application will actually group multiple instances into one icon on the system tray). So applications like Outlook, Instant Messaging clients, etc, can be moved to the system tray without any problems.

TrayIt is a free software that you can use to minimize ANY application to the system tray instead of the taskbar.

There are several ways you can use TrayIt once it has been installed (actually it’s just an EXE file, so you can run it without any installation!).

To temporarily put any window in the system tray, hold down the SHIFT key while when pressing the minimize button at the top right of the window.
To always keep a window in the system tray when minimized, right-click on the icon in the system tray for that app (created from the first step) and check off “Place in System Tray” from the popup menu.
Simply right-click on the minimize icon itself and choose Place in System Tray.

To activate an application from the system tray, simply double-click on it. You can go into the options and change it to single click if you like. It also has a feature you can check called Minimize when in Foreground, activate when in Background which will minimize the program if it’s the active window, otherwise it will bring it from the background into the foreground.

TrayIt works on Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP and Vista. Overall, it’s a really cool free program that makes it super easy to minimize any application to the system tray. Definitely check it out! Enjoy!

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2 Responses to “How to minimize any taskbar application to the system tray”

Manav said on : December 22nd, 2007 at 8:56 am

Educating and Descriptive, Will try this.
Thanks.

akishore said on : December 22nd, 2007 at 1:46 pm

I really like TrayIt, it’s a great app for minimizing applications to the system tray in Windows XP or Vista. It works on just about any app too!