I have a Dell Latitude C840 laptop running Windows XPsp3 (upgraded from Win2kSp4 a year or so ago). Recently the NVidia graphics card icon in my LIMITED USER account has mysteriously disappeared from the system tray (aka Notification Area), which makes it tedious to access my external Dell 2001FP monitor in DualView. It is even more tedious to shut down the external monitor without messing up the desktop’s icon arrangement, as explained below.
But my Administrator account’s system tray has NOT lost its NVidia graphics card icon. Nevertheless, temporarily granting Administrator privileges to my Limited User account does not return its NVidia graphics card icon to its system tray.
My question is: Is there any way to restore the NVidia graphics card to my Limited User account’s system tray?
Thanks for any comments, suggestions, or help.
R.N. (Roger) Folsom
—————————————————————-
Addendum: Why I want to restore the missing NVidia system tray icon.
Instead of using the missing NVidia icon, after turning on the external monitor, I right-click the desktop and go to Properties (not nView properties) to get a Display Properties dialog box. Its Settings tab lets me activate the external monitor. That’s not a major task.
Shutting down the external monitor is more of a project, because Display Properties > Settings tab does not have a way to de-activate the external monitor (unless I’m overlooking something). As an alternative, I have tried right-clicking the desktop and selecting nView (i.e. NVidia) Properties. In the Profiles tab, I select “Single Monitor from DualView” > Load, but that turns the external monitor into a clone of my laptop’s screen. Alternatively, if in the NVidia Properties Profiles tab I select “Single Monitor from Clone Span” > Load, again that turns the external minotor into a clone of my laptop’s screen. And in either case, the arrangement of my laptop screen’s icons (and the external monitor’s cloned icons) is thoroughly rearranged into a mess.
So I skip opening nView (NVidia) Properties, and simply turn off the external monitor. Sometimes that simple approach also rearranges my laptop screen’s icons into a mess, if not immediately then later on my next reboot (even with the external monitor turned off).
To fix any laptop screen’s icon mess, I fortunately have a installed a copy of DesktopIconLayout,Save,Restore (JSI Tip3325), so before starting to use my external monitor, I use that utility to save my desktop’s current arrangement, which then enables me to rearrange all my messed-up desktop icons into their original locations. I would attach a copy of that utility and its documentation to this post, but I don’t see any way to do that. I think that the JSI website is defunct. With luck its content is available elsewhere, but I don’t know where.
