Windows Vista and Windows 7 both have the useful feature of Taskbar Previews. Just hover your mouse cursor over a window shown in the taskbar and it shows a tiny preview thumbnail of the actual window without any need to switch to that window. The thumbnail shown for a window is the live thumbnail – it shows exactly what is being shown in the actual window at the current time. The time taken for the thumbnail to show is 400 milliseconds by default. But if you do not want to wait for 400 milliseconds (less than half a second), then you can decrease (or increase) this time using a registry hack. Here is how :
- Press the keyboard combination Windows logo key + R to open the Run dialog. In the Run dialog, type regedit.exe and press Enter to start the Windows Registry Editor.
- In the Registry Editor, navigate to the following key :
HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerAdvanced
- Right click anywhere in the right side pane and select New → DWORD (32-bit) Value as shown.
- Give the newly created DWORD value a name of ExtendedUIHoverTime and set its value to the number of milliseconds you want to wait before thumbnail previews are shown in the taskbar. By default, this time is 400 milliseconds. But you can change it to a shorter or longer duration of time.
- Close Registry Editor and log off from Windows. Then log on again for the changes to take effect. You can also restart your computer to let Windows reload the settings from the Registry.