Sometimes it happens that any or all of the system icons such as Clock, Volume, Network and Power or Battery icons disappear, missing or hiding from systray area. The easy solution is to re-enable the showing of system icons on Notification Area tab of Taskbar and Start Menu Properties. However, sometimes, even the checkboxes to enable or disable the displaying of system icons are disable or grayed out, forbidding user from enabling the icons in notification area.
The problem arises when Windows group policy disables the Clock, Network, Power (or Battery), and Volume icons, or the registry keys related to notification area icons have corrupted. To re-enable and restore the check boxes, and hence user able to restore these system icons on notification area, the policies have to be turned off, and the registry keys reset, cleared or fixed. Note that Power icon may remain grayed out unless your computer is a notebook or laptop, or has a UPS battery backup connected to it.
Enable System Icons via Local Group Policy Editor
- Run GPedit.msc to start Local Group Policy Editor.
- Expand the tree to go to User Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Start Menu and Taskbar.
- Change set the state value to Disable or Not Configured for the following group policies to enable showing or displaying of the icon in the notification area.
Clock: Remove Clock from the system notification area.
Volume: Remove the volume control icon.
Network: Remove the networking icon.
Power (battery) Icon: Remove the battery meter.
- Close the Local Group Policy Editor.
- Restart Explorer, Log off and log on again, or restart computer to make the change effective.
User who uses Windows without Local Group Policy Editor can modify the registry value via Registry Editor instead.
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