A past tip of the week explained how to hide inactive system tray icons in Windows XP. Is there any way to hide a number of icons in the Windows 98 SE system tray? I never use most of the icons, so they are just taking up space.

Windows 98 SE doesn’t have inbuilt support for hiding inactive icons, as this feature was only introduced in Windows XP. However, a quick search of Google showed that there are some utilities which can mimic this behaviour. Tray Pilot Lite (www.colorpilot.com/hidetray.html) is a free utility which can hide the whole system tray (i.e. all the system tray icons, and the system clock) by clicking a small button and then restore the tray by clicking the same button. There is a full-featured version of Tray Pilot (www.colorpilot.com/tray.html) which costs US$15.55 and will only hide the system tray icons, leaving the system clock visible. PS Tray Factory (www.pssoftlab.com) which costs US$24.95 has the feature to mimic the Windows XP behaviour, by hiding low activity or inactive icons by moving these from the system tray into a special system tray menu. I have not used any of these utilities, so I am not offering a recommendation on these programs. These are just some programs I found when searching Google. I encourage you to have a look around to see if these meet your needs.