This step by step guide will show you how to minimize your Apps in Windows 10 to the System Tray or the Taskbar – allowing you to choose instead of having Windows decide for you.
Note: Windows 10 now calls the ‘System Tray’ the ‘Notification Area’. It’s the same thing.
- OK first things first – download RBTray. It’s small and shouldn’t take much time to download at all. Once the file has finished downloading, right-click it and select Extract All…
- Place a check in the box labelled Show extracted files when complete and then click the Browse… button.
- Navigate to somewhere on your C: drive where you can install and store the file. A great place is inside your C:\Program Files\ folder. Once you’ve navigated there, click the New folder button (see screenshot below)
- In all likelihood you’ll be prompted with a confirmation dialog box – click the Continue button.
- Give your folder a name (rbtray or just tray are some examples), make sure that newly created folder is ‘highlighted’ (selected) and then click the Select Folder button.
- Once again a confirmation dialog window will appear. Place a check in the box labelled Do this for all current items and then click the Continue button.
- You’re almost there :) Open the 64bit folder and then double-click the RBtray.exe file.
- Absolutely nothing just happened, or did it? Open any program at all and right-click the minimize button (instead of the normal/regular “left click”).
- Ta-da! When you right-click the ‘minimize’ button on an App, it will send that App to the System Tray instead of the Taskbar. If you ‘left click’ – ie. click it as you normally would, it will minimize to the System Taskbar, as it normally would. Now you have the best of both worlds!
- If there’s one tiny drawback to RBTray it’s that it doesn’t start on its own each time Windows does. We have you covered though! :) Just follow the steps outlined in this guide and you can have Windows include RBTray in its list of ‘startup apps’.
