Today, I am going to explain what the Windows Tray is and what it’s functions are. Now it’s often called the System Tray or sometimes just the tray.

Now in the default installation of Windows, the Taskbar runs along the bottom of the screen, it starts in the left side with the Start menu and it ends on the right side with the tray. So the tray, the Windows tray is just an extension; an area of the Windows Taskbar. You could see here that I have icons from programs that are running, that are displayed here in the tray and those are called tray icons.

Now, many programs offer options when you right click on their tray icons, so then you can accomplish things without having to open up the full program. You can also see here thet the tray could display the time and that’s controlled in the Taskbar function and if you don’t want to see the time, you can just disable that.

Now another thing that you can do in the tray, if you right click, click on Customize Notifications and that comes up over on the left side, so I’ll drag it over here where we can see it because at here we see a list of every program that’s running in my tray. And you can see by default, their Behavior is Hide when inactive.

But for example, say I always wanted to Hide the icons or snag it. I can click select Always Hide and perhaps Logitech QuickCam, I don’t want to Always Show. I make the changes that I want, in that way, the tray icons have the Behavior I want. Click OK and that’s all there is to it.

So that’s the Windows Tray, also called the System Tray or the Tray and that’s all there is to it.