gHacks technology news » past icons http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Wed, 25 Nov 2009 15:55:11 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Past Icons Flusher http://www.ghacks.net/2008/04/09/past-icons-flusher/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/04/09/past-icons-flusher/#comments Wed, 09 Apr 2008 08:22:13 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=3761 I have written about Past Icons in Windows before and described a manual way on how to remove those icons from your system. Every icon that appears in the system tray is cached by Windows and will remain in that cache even if you uninstall the application completely from your computer. You can take a look at all cached items on your system if you like to see that they can reveal information about your system even if you thought that you did leave no traces of an application behind.

Right-click the Windows taskbar and select Properties from the menu. Now click on the Customize button which opens a window entitled Custom Notifications. That window is divided into current items which are those that are currently active on your system and past icons which are the icons that are stored in the cache. This includes icons from applications that are still installed on the system but also from those that are no longer installed on the computer.

Past Icons Flusher is a software that clears those past icons automatically which means that you do not have to go into the Registry and remove them manually. The program asks you during execution if you want to flush the Past Icons, a click on Yes starts the process while a click on No cancels it.

Please note that the explorer instance is killed in the process but it should restart just fine after the Past Icons have been removed.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2008/04/09/past-icons-flusher/feed/ 6 Remove Custom Notifications information in Windows http://www.ghacks.net/2007/08/12/remove-custom-notifications-information-in-windows/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/08/12/remove-custom-notifications-information-in-windows/#comments Sun, 12 Aug 2007 18:08:55 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2007/08/12/remove-custom-notifications-information-in-windows/ Not many Windows users now what the Custom Notifications are or where one could take a look at the elements hidden there. Microsoft describes Custom Notifications as the way in Windows to display active and urgent notifications. These icons show if you have new mail for instance.

The real problem that arises is that past icons are kept there as well which means that everyone can access these information which could be a privacy problem.

Custom Notifications can be accessed by right-clicking the taskbar and choosing Properties from the menu. Click on the Customize button next to the Hide inactive icons entry to see all active and past entries in there – you might be surprised about the amount of icons listed there.

custom notifications

Microsoft does not offer an elegant way to clean past Custom Notifications items which is why I would recommend the Open Source software Past Icons Flusher which cleans all past icons when executed.

The software has a size of only 19K and can be executed from any location, no installation needed.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2007/08/12/remove-custom-notifications-information-in-windows/feed/ 2 How to remove past icons from the taskbar http://www.ghacks.net/2006/07/23/how-to-remove-past-icons-from-the-taskbar/ http://www.ghacks.net/2006/07/23/how-to-remove-past-icons-from-the-taskbar/#comments Sun, 23 Jul 2006 18:22:09 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2006/07/23/how-to-remove-past-icons-from-the-taskbar/ You have uninstalled the program completely and are sure that no reference is left on your computer. What if there is still one left that you probably did not know about ? Every item that appears on the left side of the clock in the taskbar will be cached by windows which means that the icon of the program is still available on your system. Check this out by yourself by right-clicking the taskbar. Select properties from the menu and click on the customize button at the bottom of that screen. If customize is not active activated it by enabling Hide Inactive Icons.

The list shows the current items at the top and past items below the current item list. I had about thirty entries of programs of which I was not using more than ten which ment that there were twenty entries with no meaning at all in there. Clearing this list is pretty easy, do the following:

  • Backup your registry first
  • Open your registry by hitting the left windows key + R ; Navigate to
  • HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current-Version\Explorer\TrayNotify
  • Remove the keys IconStreams and PastIconStreams.
  • Close the registry and reboot your machine.

Windows will compile a list of available icons after the restart which means that all entries of programs that you used in the past will be gone.

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