The Geek (over at How-to Geek) wrote about how you can make the Task Manager run in the system tray at startup. It’s a great tutorial only it requires too many steps to accomplish. It gives you a great step-by-step tutorial on how you can do it manually in Windows, though. Here’s our version with a few steps trimmed down.

Call it a workaround but we do use a startup manager for this one. There are a lot of startup managers there but I still use this one that I have tried and tested for the past four or five years - CodeStuff’s Starter which you can download here. Okay, so this can be an added step, but trust us, you’ll be using this nifty program more than once. What’s better is it’s portable for use in a USB drive too.

Run Starter.

Click New. This allows you to create a new shortcut to be added in the list of tasks to be run during startup.

Fill up the forms:

Name: Task Manager
Value: C:\Windows\System32\taskmgr.exe
Run State: Minimized

Click OK and you’re good to go. The Task Manager will now load in the System Tray during startup.