Recently we posted about adjusting Taskbar thumbnail live preview delay time. 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 and if you hover your mouse cursor over the small thumbnail, Windows shows a live preview of the running application and makes all other running applications windows transparent.
If you don't like the live preview feature and want to turn it off, this tutorial will help you. Today we are sharing a small registry trick to disable these live previews.
So here we start the tutorial:
1. Type regedit in RUN or Startmenu Searchbox and press Enter. It'll open Registry Editor.
2. Now go to following key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced
3. In right-side pane, create a new DWORD value DisablePreviewWindow and set its value to 1 to disable live previews.
4. That's it. Log off or restart your system to take effect.
NOTE: If you want to restore default settings, simply delete "DisablePreviewWindow" DWORD value or change its value to 0.
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:
Complete list of AskVG articlesThis article was posted in Windows 7.
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C Murdock
I don't know what RTM is. I have Home Premium, and this solution is not working. However, increasing the mouse hover time to 1000000 (about 16 minutes) works about 99% of the time, but I still get a stray preview window popping up on occasion. To me, those windows are incredibly distracting. Microsoft seems intent on annoying its users to death.
Rubab
Same thing here. I used the Reg Script you provided.
Merged it with my Windows 7 Ultimate RTM x86 and restarted my PC.
But the Thumbnail Live Previews are still there. It doesn't work.
C Murdock
To all: None of the registry tricks to get rid of preview windows seem to work. Go to this site and download this free utility program which will allow you to get rid of it (for both 32- and 64-bit Windows 7):
http://www.rammichael.com/
The program you want is 7 Taskbar Tweaker. It works very well. I'm not the developer -- I'm a user -- and this program solved all my taskbar programs.
Note that it comes in the zip format .RAR, so you'll need a utility to unzip it. You can find a free utility here:
http://www.7-zip.org/
If you have tried the Registry trick of delaying the opening of the preview window for a long period (say, ten minutes) as a way to disable it, you should know that it doesn't always work. You'll still see the preview window about 5% of the time (and it's always a huge annoyance when you do -- Microsoft seems intent on annoying its customers).