So who decides which icons stay visible all the time and which are hidden until you call for them in the notification area? Windows tries, but you can make the decisions yourself if you prefer. To customize the behavior of each icon in the tray, follow these steps:

1. Right-click the taskbar (any blank area) and select Properties.
2. On the Taskbar tab, make sure Hide inactive icons is marked. (If it's not currently marked, your tray did not have the arrow button shown in Figure 2-3.)
3. Click the Customize button. The Customize Notifications dialog box appears.
4. Open the drop-down list for one of the active icons and select a setting for it, as shown in Figure 2-5:

Always Show: Show it even if you never use it.

Always Hide: Hide it even if you use it a lot.

Hide When Inactive: Show it if you use it a lot; otherwise hide it.

(By 'use it' we mean, you either double-click it to open its window or right-click it and select commands from its menu.)

Figure 2-5: Select which icons appear in the tray all the time and which are hidden.

5. Click OK to accept the new settings, and then OK again to close the Taskbar Properties dialog box.

How Background Applications Get Installed

You might be wondering at this point where all those background applications come from. There are nearly as many sources as there are applications, but here are the major categories:

• Utilities: Some utility programs are designed to run primarily in the background, and to spring into view only when they're needed. Antivirus software is a prime example. You buy such a program and install it with the expectation that it will run in the background.
• Extras for other applications: Some regular applications have background components that supplement them. For example, both Quicken and Microsoft Money have bill payment reminders that run in the background, even when the main application is not running. This is an example of a program that you may not need and that you can disable from loading to free up a bit of memory.
• Hardware services: Many hardware devices have a special controller program that runs when you use them, and these controller programs typically run in the background waiting to be activated. Examples include software for scanners, printers, PDA (personal digital assistant) docking cradles, CD-RW drives, and the driver that controls your sound card's speaker volume. Having the controller program preloaded and waiting can make the device start up faster when you need it, but if you seldom use that device, it can be needlessly wasteful of system memory. If you've turned off the device's controller in the notification area and need to use it, you might need to manually restart the controller (or it might start itself automatically).
• Useless annoyances: The internet is fraught with irritating advertising software (adware) that purports to do something useful for you, like let you earn money or points, but makes ads pop up all the time on your computer or redirects your internet searches through an advertising portal. Unfortunately, it's too easy to get one of these installed (just accidentally click on Yes rather than No in a dialog box). Some of these have tray icons; some don't. You find out how to get rid of them for good later in this lesson.

To shutdown most of the background applications in the tray, right-click the applications and select Close (or Exit, or Quit, or some such command); however, when you restart the computer, they come back because they're set to load automatically at startup. The rest of this lesson is devoted to various ways to get rid of the unwanted background programs permanently, so you don't have to keep turning them off every time you restart.