Friday, February 15, 2013

Reducing Skype to the system tray

Ever since Microsoft announced the closure of MSN messenger, I have been dreading the switch because it would mean some reconfiguration and I am not in a very good position now to do too many of those. Alas, they decided to merge MSN contact list with Skype.

So my Skype is not very well-configured, specifically, it doesn't reduce to the system tray or "the notification area at the right hand lower corner of your Windows screen". I like that because then it wouldn't clutter up my task bar. So I will write here a walkthrough which I used before on MSN to do the same thing for Windows 7:

1) First, open Skype, go to Tools > Options > Advanced, and uncheck "Keep Skype in the taskbar while I'm signed in"

2) Close Skype

3) Go to Start Menu, right click on the "Skype" icon. Go to Properties > Compatibility.

4) Check "Run this program in compatibility mode for:" and choose "Windows Vista (Service Pack 2)" on the pulldown.

5) Click "Apply" and "OK"

6) Restart Skype and it should minimize to systray now!!

Apparently you could do that for a number of different software that used to reduce to systray but does not do that anymore in Windows 7.

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