Hide the Safely Remove Hardware Icon from System Tray

Posted August 24, 2004 by mikejc in Windows

This tech-recipe explains how to hide the Safely Remove Hardware icon from the system tray.


If you have an USB device attached to your system, you will notice an icon in the Notification area. When clicked, the icon will give you the option to Stop your hardware, before you unplug it.

It is possible that you never unplug this hardware. Therefore, how do you get rid of the icon?

As far as I know, the only way to remove it is to right-click the Notification area, and select Properties. Under the Notification area heading, click Customize. Find the Safely Remove Hardware icon and select Always hide in the Behavior column next to it. (Press OK and Apply to back out).

 

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  • http://bigtugboat.com bigtugboat

    Thanks a lot for this recipe 🙂 I just wanted to remove that particular icon from the system tray because my four-year old would click it and then disconnect the modem. I googled for the solution, landed at your blog, learnt how to do the thing and am relieved to see the icon gone 🙂
    Just wanted to say thanks for the guiide lines 🙂

  • name

    this doesn’t actually remove the icon, it simply hides it. the icon still stays in the systray and takes up memory resources.

  • , mike

    thanks

  • Anonymous

    My problem is that the USB icon with green check mark tells me to safely unplug hardware. The hardware is the C: and D: recovery drive. Dell told me that it is a software issue that needs registry maintenance (not covered by their hardware warranty).
    Also, if you look in device manager and find “SCSI disk drive”, one can see the properties. Open properties and go under the tab called “policies”. A performance enhancer called “write caching” is enabled. This is the reason for the icon. There is an option to unselect it but I was told to leave it alone.

  • Mike O

    Why can’t I find a solution to this annoying problem cannot remove “safely remove hardware” in system tray vista? It is there everytime I start up my computer. It showing that my Teac memory card slots are in use when in fact there is no card in any slot! Dell 530 w/vista home premium. BTW microsoft lists no solution to this problem either. There has to be some geek out there that knows a fix.
    Mike O