How to Disable Desktop Previews for Taskbar Live Thumbnails in Windows 10
In Windows 10, when you hover over a taskbar button of a running app or group of apps, a thumbnail preview appears on the screen. For a single window it shows a single thumbnail, and for multiple windows it shows a number of thumbnail previews in a row. When you hover over a preview thumbnail, it dims other open windows and shows a preview of its app. If you want, you can disable this feature.
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As you may be aware, Windows 7 introduced a redesigned taskbar which abandoned much loved classic features but introduced some nice improvements like large icons, jump lists, draggable buttons etc. Windows 10 comes with the same taskbar. It does not have many configurable settings exposed in the GUI to tweak its behavior but there are some hidden secret Registry settings which you can fine-tune. In this article, we will see how to change the taskbar thumbnail hover delay in Windows 10.
When you hover over the taskbar button of an open app, it will show you a small thumbnail preview of its window. See the following screenshot:
When you hover over a preview thumbnail, it dims other open windows and shows a preview of its app. See the following screenshot:
You can disable this behavior and make the taskbar thumbnail feature less distracting. Also, this feature is sometimes annoying when you hovered a taskbar thumbnail accidentally. After disabling it, hovering the taskbar thumbnail won't hide open windows. See the following screenshot:
To Disable Desktop Previews for Taskbar Live Thumbnails in Windows 10,
- Open the Registry Editor app.
- Go to the following Registry key.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced
See how to go to a Registry key with one click. - On the right, modify or create a new 32-Bit DWORD value DisablePreviewWindow.
Note: Even if you are running 64-bit Windows you must still create a 32-bit DWORD value. - Set its value data to 1 to disable the feature.
- To make the changes done by the Registry tweak take effect, you need to sign out and sign in to your user account. Alternatively, you can restart the Explorer shell.
You are done!
To undo the feature, you need to remove the DisablePreviewWindow value from the registry, or set it to 0 (zero). Don't forget to sign out or restart Explorer after that.
Also, you can have taskbar preview thumbnails completely disabled in Windows 10, along with the right corner desktop preview feature (Aero Peek).
Instead, you can change Taskbar Thumbnail Threshold to show a window list, and change the taskbar preview thumbnail size.
That's it
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I want the thumbnail preview to show over other windows i already have open rather than it not showing at all
I want the thumbnail preview to show over other windows i already have open rather than it not showing at all