Archive: Posts Tagged ‘notification area’

How-to: Minimize Windows Live Mail to the “tray”

9 comments September 21st, 2009

Are you using Windows Live Mail as your primary e-mail program and thus running it all the time? I bet that its taskbar button will get in your way sometimes. When I played around with Live Mail’s options, I found a way to minimize Windows Live Mail to my system notification area, commonly known as [...]

How-to: Connect to a synced folder with Windows Live Sync

Comments Off September 8th, 2009

If you have Windows Live Sync installed on your computer, you can connect a computer to a synchronized folder to synchronize files. You must install the Sync software from the Sync website, on every computer that you want to synchronize files on. You can connect multiple computers to a personal folder, but each one must [...]

Security Essentials: How long may a ‘quick scan’ take?

2 comments August 16th, 2009

Being in the official Microsoft Security Essentials beta, I am using this anti-virus solution in my production environment. This morning, its icon in the system notification area turned yellow, and the software alerted me that a system scan has not been run for some time. Security Essentials offered me to do the scan instantly, and [...]

The 256 colors experiment, Part I

1 comment July 20th, 2009

Nowadays, displays offer a rich variety of colors, mostly 32-bit, allowing a multitude of 4,294,967,296 different colors—more than 4 billion! Graphic artists tend to use more and more of these possibilities. Messenger is one of them, especially in version 2009, also known as Wave 3. But if you have a display that allows only 256 [...]

How-to: Minimize Messenger to the system notification area in Windows 7

5 comments May 14th, 2009

If you are running Messenger quite frequently, perhaps even permanently, the rather big Messenger icon in the “normal” taskbar might get into your way rather quickly. How would it be to force Messenger to act like in previous versions of Windows—that is, to “minimize to tray”? Here is how you can.

Messenger Start Menu Tasks in Windows 7

1 comment December 29th, 2008

Today I got the chance to install the Windows Live Messenger 2009 RC (14.0.8050.1202) on Windows 7 (6.1.7000 / CES build), and I want to highlight 2 things I have noticed when using it there. Start Menu Tasks The first thing I noticed was that Messenger introduced a popup menu with an arrow to the [...]