Windows 7 allows you to customize the notification area to show or hide icons on the notification area.

Windows 7 has an improved notification area on your Windows Taskbar where it just only displays a small subset of the icons and then an arrow button to let you browse all the other hidden icons on the notification area.

That’s cool and it really improves on the long list of icons that we got used to seeing on the notifications area for so long with Windows XP and Windows Vista. But if you want to have some icons always displayed by default without you clicking on that arrow button then you have to customize the Notification area. In this walkthrough we’ll see how we can make the Windows Task Manager icon always displayed on the Notification Area.

Step-1: Configure Task Manager to hide when minimized

This is a pre-requisite only for this example so that when the Task Manager window gets minimized we’ll still get an icon on our Notifications Area indicating the activity.

Step-2: Task Bar and Start Menu Properties

Right-click on the Windows Orb (Start button) and click on the Properties menu option.

Step-3: Customize Notification Area

Click on the "Customize…” button on the Notification Area panel.

Step-4: Show icon and notifications

When Windows pops-up the Notifications dialog you should be able to see the Windows Task Manager item on the list having a defaul value of “Only show notifications”. With that option set Task Manager icon won’t show up  on the Notifications Area by default. We have to change the value to “Show icon and notifications”. Hit the OK button to close all dialogs.

Now you should be able to see the Task Manager icon showing up on the Notifications Area along with the icons whose Behavior values are set to “Show icon and notifications”.

If you have any questions/comments regarding this please let us know in comments.