How to Adjust Taskbar Thumbnail Delay Time in Windows 7

In Windows 7, whenever you hover your mouse cursor over a running application’s button in Taskbar, Windows shows a small thumbnail of running application with a close button.

But the thumbnail appears after 400 milliseconds which is way too long and sometimes it becomes quite annoying to keep hovering the mouse cursor to show the thumbnail.

Today we are sharing a small registry trick which can be used to adjust this hover delay time. You can set the delay time to 100 milliseconds (which is perfect IMO) to get the thumbnail faster.

So here we start the tutorial:

1. Type regedit in RUN or Start Menu Searchbox and press Enter. It’ll open Registry Editor.

2. Now go to following key:

3. In right-side pane, create a new DWORD value ExtendedUIHoverTime

4. Now you’ll need to set its value to your desired delay time. Double-click on it and select “Base” as Decimal and enter the desired value. Remember the value should be given in milliseconds. Set the value to 100 for best experience.

5. That’s it. Log off or restart your system to take effect.

BONUS TIP: If you want to completely turn off Taskbar thumbnails, unfortunately its not possible in Windows 7 RTM as the functionality has been removed by Microsoft. But you can set the value of “ExtendedUIHoverTime” to 10000 or more to increase the thumbnail delay time. Of course its not the best solution but it works quite good.

NOTE: If you want to restore default settings, simply delete “ExtendedUIHoverTime” DWORD value created in Step 3.

PS: If you want a ready-made script to do the task automatically, download following ZIP file, extract it and run the extracted REG file. It’ll ask for confirmation, accept it:

Download Registry Script