A few months back, we reviewed the new "Windows Update Status Icon" feature introduced in newer versions of Windows 10 operating system. Windows 10 shows a status icon in Taskbar notification area (system tray) if there are some notifications or alerts available from Windows Update.
For example, Windows Update installed some updates and now a system restart is required or Windows Update was unable to connect to Internet and download important updates or some optional updates are available for download and Windows 10 wants to notify you about them. In such conditions, a status icon is displayed in Taskbar notification area.
Many people may not like this extra icon in notification area and might get annoyed by the frequent notifications and alerts shown by the status icon.
We also shared a registry tweak to permanently disable and remove this feature in Windows 10. The registry tweak allowed you to completely deactivate the feature and restrict Windows 10 to show the Windows Update status icon in Taskbar notification area.
Now here is a good news. Microsoft has added an extra option to the status icon's context menu (right-click menu) to hide the icon in Taskbar notification area.
So if you don't want to apply any registry tweak, you can take help of this new option to hide the Windows Update status icon and get rid of the icon and its frequent alerts.
To use this new option, whenever Windows Update status icon appears in Taskbar notification area, right-click on the icon and you'll get a new option "Hide for now" in context menu as shown in following screenshot:
Click on the "Hide for now" option and it'll immediately remove the Windows Update status icon from Taskbar notification area.
A small but very useful feature addition by Microsoft.
