Windows 7 - Taskbar - Change Icon Button Width Size

**xenol**

How to Change the Windows 7 Taskbar Icon Width Size

Information

While Windows 7 offers the nice feature of grouping programs and combining them into a stack, not everyone enjoys this. Some may want just the icons without the stacking feature. In other words, it's like having "Never combine, hide labels" or "Combine when full, hide labels" option. Alternatively you can use this to manually set how big you want the buttons to be. This will show you how to customize how wide you want your pinned taskbar icons.

There's a simple registry hack and settings change you can do to do this.

Set the options

Open Taskbar properties.
In the "Taskbar Appearance" group, change the "Taskbar Button" option to your liking. Select "Combine if full" if you still want stacking, "Never combine" if you don't want stacking. Note this hack won't work if you use "Always combine, hide labels".

Adding/editing the registry entry

Press Windows Key + R to open the run command
Type int "regedit" (without quotes) and press OK
Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER -> Control Panel -> Desktop -> WindowMetrics
Find the "MinWidth" entry in the right pane.
If "MinWidth" is not there, right click on an empty space and select New -> String Value. Name this entry "MinWidth" (without quotes)
Double click on the MinWidth entry. If you want just the buttons to show, set this to 38 if you're using small buttons, 52 if you're using large buttons. Otherwise any value above 38 will work. If you set a value below 38, the buttons will behave oddly.
Log off and log back in or restart to see the changes.

Deleting/Uninstalling

Press Windows Key + R to open the run command
Type int "regedit" (without quotes) and press OK
Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER -> Control Panel -> Desktop -> WindowMetrics
Find the "MinWidth" entry and delete it.
Log off and log back in or restart to see the changes.

Tip

A registry install script has been added for small or large icons and an uninstaller.

Related Tutorials

**rsvr85** · 08-20-2009

Gonna give this one a try, thanks xenol

**Jaxel** · 09-02-2009

Sadly, this script doesn't do what you would really want it to do.

What this script does is limit the size of the icon to a specific size, even if you have the setting to show text labels. If you like the text labels, what you really want is a script to limit the size of the icons when the program is NOT open.

**xenol** · 09-03-2009

Quote: Originally Posted by Jaxel

What this script does is limit the size of the icon to a specific size, even if you have the setting to show text labels. If you like the text labels, what you really want is a script to limit the size of the icons when the program is NOT open.

Regarding the text labels, I mentioned it's basically like taking them off and showing just the icon. You can set the MinWidth entry to whatever you like.

As a side note, the MinWidth entry has been around since Windows 2000, and it apparently means the button width of a minimized window... or something. Since this only affects programs that are open, it won't affect pinned programs that are not currently running.

**thundt** · 07-14-2011

Change icons to correct, medium size (affects toolbar including QuickLaunch)

Right click desktop -> Personalize -> Window Color -> Caption Buttons = 21.

May have to reboot if they appear grainy.

cf. System tray icons got super tiny?

Windows 7 - Taskbar - Change Icon Button Width Size

Taskbar - Change Icon Button Width Size

Taskbar - Change Icon Button Width Size problems?