Control your PC from your taskbar
By adding software icons to your taskbar’s system tray, you can perform tasks and monitor your computer with just one click. Will Stapley reveals how to create the ultimate PC dashboard
Put your taskbar to better use and make it easier to control a whole range of tools from your PC’S desktop
Network and hardware monitors
Open Hardware Monitor www.snipca.com/34760
How fast is your processor running? How much memory is your PC using? What’s your hard drive’s temperature? Open Hardware Monitor (OHM) has the answers. Whether you’re diagnosing a problem or simply curious about what the components inside your PC are doing, OHM lets you keep an eye on everything by adding what it calls sensors to your system tray.
To add a sensor, load Open Hardware Monitor, right-click what you want to monitor, then select ‘Show in Tray’ (see screenshot below). An icon for the sensor will appear in your system tray that will be updated in real time. If you want to change the icon’s colour, right-click it, then select ‘Change Colour…’.
Traystatus www.snipca.com/34761
Many modern keyboards no longer have indicator lights on the Num Lock, Scroll Lock and Caps Lock keys. If you’d like the status of these keys clearly indicated, install Traystatus.
To configure it, open Traystatus, select the Status Indicators tab down the side and then choose which indicators you want to appear on your system tray. When we tried it, we opted for the Caps Lock indicator, meaning when Caps Lock is off, the icon has a black background; when it’s on it turns white. There are plenty more status indicators to choose from, but note the ones in blue require you to upgrade to Traystatus Pro (for £8).
Wifinian www.snipca.com/34762
Wifinian is effectively a replacement for Windows’ standard Wi-fi system-tray icon. It not only lets you quickly rename networks (so you can give them more meaningful names without changing their SSIDS), but also lists all the networks you’ve previously connected to. Wifinian will attempt to connect to the network at the top of the list first, then move to the next and so on. To change the order, click Organize (top right), then use the arrow buttons to move each network up and down the list accordingly (see screenshot below left).
Nettraffic www.snipca.com/34763
Metered connections for home broadband (whereby you’re restricted to a set amount of data every month) are rare these days. However, when travelling with your laptop you may find you need to tether it to your mobile phone in order to connect to the internet. If so, make sure you install Nettraffic. This tool monitors how much data you’re downloading from (and uploading to) the internet, so you can make sure your PC doesn’t devour your
Desktop tools
stray www.snipca.com/34765
If you fondly remember the simpler Start menus of previous Windows versions, stray is definitely worth downloading. Right-click its yellow icon and you’ll be provided with Windows 7-style power shortcuts, including shut down, logging off, restart, sleep and more. Better still, you can customise what options appear and change their order by right-clicking the icon, then selecting Options. While in the Options menu, we recommend ticking the ‘Allow left-click to open tray menu’ box, which lets you run stray with either a left- or right-click.
Eartrumpet www.snipca.com/34764
The speaker icon in Windows lets you adjust the overall volume of your computer, but not much else. With Eartrumpet, you get quick access to volume levels for each program that’s playing audio. This lets you set, for example, how loud a Youtube video should play, and whether you want system notifications to be heard over it. Eartrumpet has the same icon as the standard Windows volume control. To avoid confusion, we recommend hiding the Windows one (see box below) or right-clicking the Eartrumpet icon, then clicking Settings, Legacy Settings and turning on ‘Use legacy Eartrumpet icon’ (see screenshot above).
Gammy www.snipca.com/34766
Fed up wrestling with your monitor’s brightness levels to avoid eye strain? Let Gammy do the hard work for you. This clever tool adjusts your monitor’s brightness depending on the type of content you’re viewing (reducing brightness on predominantly white screens such as documents, then ramping it up on darker screens, such as when viewing photos). Click the system-tray icon to change its settings, including adjusting the Offset value (see screenshot above right), which prevents Gammy from dimming the screen too much (we found this was best set between 60 and 70 per cent).
Gammy can’t set different brightness levels on multiple screens, however. If you want to do that, try Monitorian ( www.snipca.com/34770). This won’t adjust brightness automatically like Gammy, but instead lets you control each of your monitor’s brightness levels using sliders.
Greenshot www.snipca.com/34767
Windows has a built-in screenshot tool called ‘Snip & Sketch’ (two, if you include Snipping Tool, which Microsoft is due to remove soon), but it’s light on features. There are plenty of alternatives, such as Greenshot, which runs entirely from your system tray. To take a screenshot, click the Greenshot icon, then choose what type of capture you want (single window, full-screen and so on). In the settings (right-click the icon, then select Preferences), you can choose to capture your cursor, set the default image format, change how screenshots are named, assign keyboard shortcuts and more.
Text tools
Deepl www.snipca.com/34768
Need to translate text in a hurry? With Deepl installed on your system tray, you can do this in seconds. Highlight the relevant words, press Ctrl+c twice, and the translation will appear in a box just above the system tray, ready to be copied into your document (or anywhere else). Note that there’s a 5,000-character limit to all translations, so you may need to translate long documents in chunks.
Puretext www.snipca.com/34769
When you copy text from a website and paste it into a document, you’ll probably end up with a mix of formatting (bold text, different-sized fonts and so on). Puretext strips all formatting from the text in your clipboard, ready to paste into any word program. Simply copy the text (Ctrl+c), click the Puretext icon in the system tray, then paste (Ctrl+v).