Windows 7 – Fast Thumbnail Previews

Warning – This tip involves editing the Windows Registry – before you implement this tip please read our guide on the Registry here – you implement this tip at your own risk, Chimpytech cannot be held responsible for any problems you encounter from editing your Registry.

As any seasoned user of Windows 7 will know, hovering over the icon for an active program on the Taskbar will show a live thumbnail of that applications screen. By default there is a slight delay between hovering the mouse and the thumbnail appearing.Faster_Thumbnails_1

Whilst this isn’t a huge amount of time, it is noticeable, and the delay can sometimes be quite irritating, but with a small registry tweak it’s possible to reduce this time, and having fast thumbnail previews will make your Windows 7 system appear to be a little faster,

  • Load up the Registry Editor (see our guide to the Registry here for instructions)
  • Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ControlPanel\Mouse.

Faster Thumbnail Previews

  • On the right open the MouseHoverTime key by double clicking it.
  • In the dialog box reduce the default value of 400 to something around 150 (Be careful not to reduce it further than this otherwise you could end up with stability problems).

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  • Exit the registry editor

This setting isn’t a dynamic setting, so you will need to reboot your PC to see the difference, but once the PC has re-booted there will be a noticeable difference in the time taken for the thumbnail image to be displayed