Remove Synaptics Touchpad Icon from System Tray
In my quest to get rid of every useless tray icon wasting memory, I was very annoyed when Vista's automatic updates installed a new driver and the icon for the touchpad ended up in my system tray again. There's almost no benefit to this icon, so it needs to go.
The icon comes in two varieties that you've probably seen.
Just right-click the icon, and choose Pointing Device Properties from the menu.
On the Device Settings tab, you'll find a Tray Icon section. Choose the Remove tray icon from taskbar radio button, and it'll immediately be gone.
I realize this is very simple for most of you, but it's good to cover everything that can save some memory.
The Geek is the founder of How-To Geek and a geek enthusiast. When he's not coming up with great how-to articles, he's probably writing at his personal blog. This article was written on 08/15/07 and tagged with: Windows Vista, Vista Tips & Tweaks
So have you come up with what the ideal amount of RAM is for a basic PC user upgrading from XP to Vista? Is it true that going over 3 GB is unnecessary and thats the OS can't manage over 3GB?
TIA,
Rich
But won't removing the tray icon not do anything but that? The device driver is still running, so it's memory will still be in use. The only memory you are freeing is just an icon in the tray. I am guessing that your memory is not significantly altered after this tweak.
Obviously removing the tray icon will only free the memory from the resident process running in the tray, but if you have 10 useless processes each taking up 1-4mb of ram, all of a sudden you are wasting up to 40mb for no good reason, not to mention the extra processor cycles that they all take.
The device driver will always be running, which makes sense unless you want to disable the trackpad entirely, which isn't what we were going for.
i have a sony vaio. and recently i had spyware and it was successfully removed by the good people working in my college's libarary. however, my computer's been acting weird. i can't change my desktop and i also cannot use my touchpad like before. so i went and look for the touchpad icon on my taskbar and could not find it. and after reading you entry, i remembered removing it from taskbar. now im trying to look for it but to no avail. i tried looking for it in the mouse options but i couldnt find it. please help me. and if you could give me some input on my desktop problem too, that would be highly appreciated. thank you!
Thanks. I'm reasonably savvy and can usually find this kind of stuff, but I was frustrated and found your pointer when I googled it. I appreciate you taking the time to post this.
Cheers,
Sean