Change Taskbar Thumbnail Live Preview Hover Delay in Windows 10

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 live preview 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 the thumbnail preview, Windows 10 will show you a live preview of that app's window.

This feature is part of "Aero Peek", which is also available for the Desktop background. By default, the preview appears almost instantly. It is possible to change the hover delay timeout and set it to a desired amount in milliseconds so the live preview will be delayed. If this delay is set to a larger value, Aero Peek will be essentially disabled for taskbar thumbnails, while the Aero Peek feature of the Desktop and taskbar buttons will remain working.

This feature can be configured with a Registry tweak.

To change Taskbar Thumbnail Live Preview Hover Delay in Windows 10, do the following.

1. Open the Registry Editor app.
2. 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.

3. On the right, create a new 32-Bit DWORD value ThumbnailLivePreviewHoverTime.Note: Even if you are running 64-bit Windows you must still create a 32-bit DWORD value.
4. You need to set its value data in decimals. Specify how many milliseconds you want to wait before the thumbnail live preview will appear. Note: 1 second equals 1000 milliseconds.
5. 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.

Tip: To disable the Taskbar Thumbnail Live Preview feature, you can set ThumbnailLivePreviewHoverTime to 120000 milliseconds.

To restore defaults, remove the ThumbnailLivePreviewHoverTime value that you created and restart the Explorer shell.

To save your time, you can use an easy to use GUI tool to control taskbar thumbnails in Winaero Tweaker:

You can get the app HERE.

That's it.