Remove unnecessary icons from System Tray

Do you have a lot of (unwanted) icons in the System Tray?
Do you want to remove them from System Tray?

When you install new application i.e. Messenger, Winamp, Real Player etc. most of them add a System Tray icons (bottom right corner of your screen).

They are there to represent programs that can either be started quickly or are running in the background. Some icons are simple to remove, just right click them and click something that mean “exit”. But few of them can be difficult to get rid of.

Why do you want to remove them?
Most probably there are two (may be more) reasons you want to remove them
You are like me, who like to keep the desktop clean and clear and want to execute program when they need
speed up the process of starting the windows quickly (because as I said earlier these are suppose to run in the background thus slows downs the process of starting windows)

To clear the icons, first check your Startup menu (Start -> All Programs -> Startup). This folder contains applications that start automatically when you start Windows (and create System Tray icons).

Simply delete unwanted applications from this folder, it will automatically remove, icons associated with the application from System Tray.

OR

Using “MSconfig” utility:
Go to (Start -> Run -> type “msconfig” and hit enter key) you will taken to a window, which looks like below image:

You will see a list of running application in the background (system tray icons).
Each application has a Checkbox, Uncheck the ones that you don’t want to start and click on either “Apply” or “OK” button. (Double check which ones you choose to disable as there are some key programs that need to there to run automatically. For example, the first 4 entries are related to antivirus application and should not be removed)

Note: You will asked to restart the system after making any changes to msconfig, after restart (if you don’t restart the PC, next time you start the computer) you will get a popup window letting you know the changes you made using msconfig utility.