Show or Hide System Icons In Tray in Windows 10

Settings Gear Icon

In Windows 10, there are a number of system icons in the notification area on the taskbar (system tray). These icons include Volume, Network, Power, Input Indicator and Action Center. Most of them are visible by default. You might want to customize which icons should be visible in the taskbar.

By default, my operating system shows the following system icons in the notification area: Network, Sound, Action Center. See the screenshot below.

To hide or show some of them, you need to use the Settings app. It is a Metro app created to replace the Control Panel for both touch screens and classic Desktop users. It consists of several pages which bring new options to manage Windows 10 along with some older options inherited from the classic Control Panel. The required page is located under Personalization - Taskbar.

Before you proceed, please keep in mind that disabling a system icon removes the icon and turns off its notifications too.

To show or hide system icons from the tray in Windows 10, do the following.

  1. Open Settings.
  2. Go to Personalization - Taskbar.
  3. On the right, click on the link "Turn system icons on or off" under Notification area.
  4. On the next page, enable or disable the system icons you need to show or hide.

You can close the Settings app now.

Tip: In Windows 10, there still exists the ability to open the classic Notification Area Icons dialog instead of Settings. Press Win + R to open the Run dialog and type the following in the Run box:

shell:::{05d7b0f4-2121-4eff-bf6b-ed3f69b894d9}


Press the Enter key. The next window will be familiar to many users:

See the following article for reference: How to access classic notification area (tray icon) options in Windows 10.

There, click the link "Turn system icons on or off" and you are done.

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Author: Sergey Tkachenko

Sergey Tkachenko is a software developer who started Winaero back in 2011. On this blog, Sergey is writing about everything connected to Microsoft, Windows and popular software. Follow him on Telegram, Twitter, and YouTube.

10 thoughts on “Show or Hide System Icons In Tray in Windows 10”

    1. How exactly it break the Start menu?
      Note: It is not a hack or a third-party tweak. This is the official feature of Windows 10.

  1. the dragging of icons with the left mouse button still works to hide or restore – just drag chosen icon up or down.

  2. This works great. We can access the taskbar settings by right click on the taskbar and then Taskbar settings. However great info.

  3. the shell:::{05d7b0f4-2121-4eff-bf6b-ed3f69b894d9} thing doesn’t seem to work here, win 10 pro x64 1803 (unactivated).
    it can only show/hide all icons but doesn’t let adjust settings individually for each icon, it crashes.

    i need a software for this that works with most recent win10 versions.
    cant use windows settings either because these options are greyed out without activation.

  4. It’s Really working, Thanx for your support.
    But what is the meaning of this shell:::{05d7b0f4-2121-4eff-bf6b-ed3f69b894d9}

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