[jaredigital]

okay, here the situation:

i always thought this 'lil bastard was called the "System Tray":

however, stupid Windows help topics list no such system tray.

so here's my deal: i want to cut back on the items showing up in the tray when my 'puter boots up. i mean, there are 3 #### sound controls. who needs that?

so i have 2 questions:

1) which of these items in my tray would you consider to be "important/vital/your computer will die without them"-type items, and should NOT be removed? they are, from left to right:
Task Scheduler, Volume, Mouse, Antivirus, Volume (again), MSN, CD Burner controls, scanner, SBLive controls, CreateCD controls, and Resource Meter. am i correct in thinking that these mostly unused items are just taking up precious resources?

okay, that was 2 questions, but there's one more:

2) how the blue #### does one get rid of these items, if he so desires? i mean, some of these have options to include them or not, but obviously the ones here do not offer an option.

so, to recap:
1) what should/could i get rid of, and would it even make a difference?
2) how the blue #### does one edit this tray area?

thank a million, d00ds.

[Null and Void]

Go to Start->Run and type in "regedit". Now go to these locations:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionRun
HKEY_CURRENT_USERSOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionRun

Write out the values here, and we can tell you what is and isn't needed. Most of that stuff is useless, so you'll be able to delete it, however, there's a couple Window's System things in there. I hate ANYTHING being started when I boot up, so I'm always deleting things from there.

[gneato]

Task Scheduler, Volume, Mouse, Antivirus, Volume (again), MSN, CD Burner controls, scanner, SBLive controls, CreateCD controls, and Resource Meter.

The ones you need are:

That answers one question...

Either you can dig through dialogs and submenus to find the "start with windows" option, or you can see if the following works for good.

Click Start, Click Run, type in "msconfig" and click ok. Switch to the startup tab and uncheck everything you don't want.

The only one that needs to stay for the computer to work properly is "System tray" (systray.exe). You should also probably leave Scanreg.

Hope it helps

(Edited by gneato at 12:21 am on Oct. 10, 2001)

[gneato]

Umm... my way protects from accidental registry deletions...

[Vetritus03]

start -> run -> msconfig -> startup tab

make sure scanreg is enabled... your favorite anti virus software if you need it.  everything else is useless unless you have a laptop.  if you use MSN messenger... it'll enable itself again every time you open it up... can't get around that.  the stuff in there that begins with NAV... is norton anti-virus... you can also disable autoexec.bat and config.sys in the general tab as well.  these are useless too unless you exit to DOS and need a CD-Rom... most likely not.

Null and Void has it right with the registry keys, but if you delete them without exporting the registry you'll loose them forever.... unless you drop to DOS and run scanreg /restore.  you want to keep scanreg in startup as if you run into a registry problem... common in Win95 you'll not be able to restore to a recent copy.  ummm... i think i'm giving you too much info, but MSCONFIG is the way to go.  it's available in Win98 and above... not 95 or 2k.

(Edited by Vetritus03 at 7:36 am on Oct. 10, 2001)

[jaredigital]

okay, i did the "msconfig" thing, and here's the list of items i wasn't sure of unchecking:

ugh, too must typing. here's a screenshot:

what else can i ditch? BTW, i appreciate the replies. :)

[Vetritus03]

ok here's what to keep:

ScanRegistry (registry scanning and restoring)

SystemTray (not really needed but ok to keep.  windows will launch it anyway)

NAV DefAlert (alert to update you Virus Definition files after so many days)

Norton Auto Protect (Norton active protection)

Microsoft Intellitype Pro (makes you hot keys on the top of your keyboard work... if you don't care.. delete this too)

if you don't care about these things... delete them... else there's what i'd keep...

most of the other things are self explanitory as to what they are/do... if you want to know just ask.

(Edited by Vetritus03 at 7:47 am on Oct. 10, 2001)

[jaredigital]

here's the "regedit" results. i'm just typing the titles, not the paths:

using: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionRun

(default)
Adaptec DirectCD
AudioHQ
CreateCD
Iomega Drive Icons
Iomega Startup Options

(btw, i don't use any iomega crap anymore.)

using HKEY_CURRENT_USERSOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionRun

(default)
MSMSGS

[Vetritus03]

all those entries can go

MSCONFIG has more in it cuz it takes in account software called startup items not jsut the registry entries.
also check runonce runonceex runservices adn runservicesex in the registry. they should appear after the RUN key.

(Edited by Vetritus03 at 7:54 am on Oct. 10, 2001)

[jaredigital]

thanks, guys. my system boots faster now, and resources are up about 10-15%. cool!

[Vetritus03]

another sassified cussomer

and again... thanks for calling Gateway!

(Edited by Vetritus03 at 8:13 am on Oct. 10, 2001)

[skyhawk133]

HAHAH!  Good times!

Speaking of calling tech support, I call up Dell spoke with 3 different people, NON of them could help me with my Vid issue, They were stumped after I told them I nuked the drivers and re-installed the NEWEST ones, and all that crap...

Didn't think it was the card though, so one of these days I'll swap that card with a 64MB card or something and see what happens, might do a little shopping for a new vid card :)

[Null and Void]

Since you have a Geforce, you may not want to use the newest drivers. The Detonator XP drivers have leaked tons of memory for a whole lot of people. I downgraded to v14.70 and the leaking stopped. Maybe you should try downgrading? See reactorcritical.com for a driver archive.

[Vetritus03]

and the memory hole... is doing what?  what does it cause?  vid corruption or locks or what?

[Null and Void]

It never caused anything to crash (for me, at least) but I caught it before it used up all my RAM and virtual memory. I'm just using it as an example to say that more bugs could have got past NVidia's poor quality testing this time (this bug has happened on Geforce 2 GTS's, MX's, and Geforce3's, under Win98 and Win2K so far that I've heard). Normally NVidia does such a good job (that the main reason I bought a GTS, because of their normally high quality drivers) I'm not sure what went wrong this time...