Cleaning Notifications in Windows Vista

At one or point or another, a notification may not seem like much but as time goes on, it grows and gets bigger. The more notifications there, the more annoying it can get. The icons hide after being inactive for a lengthy period of time. The gripe is that Explorer will store it and that can be a problem. It keeps track of every icon and soon enough it can get in the 100s or the 1000s possibly if you have that many.

It does keep the items and can cause memory to really increase in usage possibly making it slower and lag for your computer. The good news is however is that it can be taken care of. It has to do with recycling your Explorer and a little trickery on the registry editing in the 1st place.

To better understand what needs to be done, 1st right click on the taskbar and then click on properties. Inside, you should see a notification tab. To customize it, it would be best to click on customize and just follow the instructions from there.

Then, the next item is customizing it and then you get some options below as directed right with this screenshot.

You should see that if you clicked on the right ones. If you look at it, sometimes the items aren't even installed anymore but there is a way to get rid of it though.

To do so, you must open up regedit.exe on the search engine bar for Vista. Next, you must go inside and follow this command directly. It has to be done this way and this way only.

HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareClassesLocal SettingsSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionTrayNotify

You should see at least two items below called IconStreams and PastIconStream. You can right click and go to delete. Before doing so, you should back them up as it could potentially cause a problem with your own computer. This is what it would look like in the screenshot below.

Once you delete them, the next item is removing Explorer by just going into the task bar and just ending the process just like that. You won't see the windows tray until you restore and you can't shut down your computer that way.

It can be restored however by just simply adding a new process and just typing in explorer and it should be restored.

To see that it worked, simply right-click the Windows Taskbar, then go into notifications, and finally select customize. If you did this right, there should be only active icons and programs you installed and that's it.

Make a note that in order for some of the icons to completely disappear, it will require a simple reboot and then you will be done. Once that's taken care of, you're then free as far as that goes. There is one other note however and it's very important. If in the event you can't select the Volume/Power/Network icons, simply close it and reopen it again. It's possible you may have to select them again.