In
Jackpine said:
Is there an option for changing the order in which icons appear in
the system tray? (I think "system tray" is the correct term. I am
referring to the icons that appear to the left of the time shown in
the bottom right-hand corner of the screen.)
Yes, but not reliably. Several of the programs get started, some in paralle,
but you can't tell which ones. When the icon pops into the system tray, that
only tells you the application loaded, not when it started. Some load very
fast, some load a lot more slowly, and many, like AV, load in chunks to the
most important parts get loaded quickly and the less important wait until
later.
ntregopt is a little program that sort of "optimizes" the registry. All it
really does is set the order of the program's startups to what it thinks is
logical.
Even if you did get an optimum loading sequence, there is no guarantee it
would remain so. The order of the icons in the System Tray even change over
time depending on what else goes on; updates, sofware installed/uninstalled,
etc..
There ARE a few 3rd party programs that claim to be able to control the
order of the programs getting loaded but I've never seen one that was much
good so I've nothing to recommend except to be very, very careful if you
decide to use one from an unknown source. I had one program that did
absolutely nothing but put nice little "working" notes on the screen and a
couple others that did something, but ... made no difference in the machine
in any way. One other one simply locked up the PC.
You can't really tell whether they do what they say or not since all you
see is the Systray is when the programs are up and running, not when they
start, or which chunks of them might have been loaded where.
I'm making this up a little, but: Besides, messing with the sequencing
could be dangerous as in, say the AV chunk to protect RAM and your Firewall
and the 'net port didn't load before IE loaded because you'd rearranged
things: now you'd be wide open to drive-by traffic to infect you. Not only
that but some things must load in the proper order or they may never load,
so if you do any testing, make sure everything that loads into the system
tray as an icon is actually working.
Personally I think they're like memory managers: It's a lot better to let
XP handle things that way. I do trust ntregopt and use it occasionally but
that's the only one I trust.
What problem are you having that specifically makes you want to control the
sequencing in the SystTray?
Twayne
