Today, I am going to show you how to customize the notification area in Windows Vista. The notification area is sometimes called the system tray and it’s the area next to the clock on the task bar. Vista automatically hides some of the icons in the notification area and you can see all of them by clicking on the little arrow. To customize which icons are shown or hidden, right click on the clock and click on properties. If you want Vista to always show all of the notification icons, uncheck the hide inactive icons box and click on apply but this can get pretty cluttered.

Down below, there are options for some special system icons that you can turn on or off by checking or unchecking their boxes. If you want to configure which of the other icons are hidden, click on the Customize button up here. Here, it will show you all the icons that currently appear in your notification area. And down below, it will show you icons that have appeared in the past.

Next to each item, there is Behavior drop down. It let’s you choose the settings for that icon. You have three options; Hide when inactive, Hide and Show. Show make it appear all the time and Hide will make it hidden all the time. If you choose Hide when inactive, the icon will only appear when that program is doing something. When you’re done configuring the icons, click on OK and then OK again. And that’s how to customize the Notification are in Windows Vista.