yamahito

Particularly for those of us running parallels across multiple monitors, here is a method of creating a floating Windows SystemTray using Geoshell:

For those of you not running parallels across multiple monitors and who are wondering what the problem is, parallels doesn’t reallly ‘do’ multiple monitors properly. It just resized the windows desktop across all monitors. I’m using parallels 2.5ish, but they still haven’t implemented proper multi-monitor support in 3.0 - it does make me wonder how well they’ll cope with Spaces when 10.5 is finally released. Anyway, it means that the Task bar is spread across both monitors which is a) ugly as sin and b) a right pain, hiding the system tray if, like me, your monitors are on different horizontal baselines.

I’m assuming you can edit the registry. If you don’t know how to do that, I wouldn’t recommend any of this. I am not responsible for you screwing up your computer.

1. Download and Install geoshell; you’ll need to install all of the utilities, but none of the extras. I’d install it in program files if I were you.
2. Configure Geoshell. To get the floating SystemTray, I suggest you start by right clicking the GeoShell taskbar >Load Plugins >New Geobar, then right click on the new geobar >Load Plugins >geoTray. Then right-click on the original Geobar (the Geoshell Taskbar) and close it. You should now have your floating trayicon. Now, let’s get it working together with explorer as a shell.
3. ctrl-alt-del to get the task manager. File >Run “regedit.exe”
4. HKCU/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Run (string) geoshell “C:\Program Files\WinShellEx\WinShellEx.exe”
5. HKCU/Software/Microsoft/Windows NT/CurrentVersion/Winlogon (string) shell “Explorer.exe”
6. HKLM/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/policies/Explorer (dWord) NoTrayItemsDisplay “1″ (you should probably know what you’re doing before you do this one. If you find you need to undo it, change the value to “0″

That should do it. log out and back in to test.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 31st, 2007 at 5:35 pm and is filed under Apple Mac, Microsoft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.