Taskbar Thumbnail Previews - Enable or Disable

First, I know that this stuff is some years old, but the system is still in use, everything is still valid, and people still read this as lurkers, so it's okay to add useful information.

None of the four options flawlessly disables thumbnail previews and list mode from showing up, on mouse over. All options have some problem, some catch...

Option one: It has the side effect of making tooltips show up immediately. This should be said on the tutorial (it's not said). The program, 7+ Taskbar Tweaker, doesn't provide a formal ability to merely disable thumbnail previews (and list mode). It offers the ability to not display anything on mouse over. While that disables thumbnail previews (and list mode) indeed, it also disables tooltips too. Tooltips reveal the full titles of windows so they are useful. The program offers the ability to replace thumbnail previews on mouse over with tooltips on mouse over. This way, the tooltips come up pretty much instantly on mouse over. That constant flickering of tooltips in and out is annoying, in a similar manner to why we're trying to disable thumbnail previews in the first place. Everywhere on the system, tooltips come up after the mouse idles for a brief amount of time. This keeps them from annoyingly coming up all the time. So this ability of replacing thumbnail previews with tooltips is no good either. As said initially, the program provides no formal ability to merely disable thumbnail previews and list mode from showing up on mouse over, without messing with tooltips, leaving them behaving normally, only showing up after about a second, rather than immediately.

Option two: It doesn't disable list mode too, it only disables thumbnail previews.

Option three: It only works if using a basic theme.

Option four: It's the best option, it achieves the goal. It shouldn't be at the bottom of the list for those who want list mode gone too. But, it has a bug, where the thumbnail previews will still pop up inadvertently. This should be said on the tutorial (it's not said). Here's how the bug happens: You need to have option four's registry tweak in place. Drag a window button on the taskbar (reordering feature). Don't do anything special (like clicking somewhere) until the next step. Click the window button that was moved, because the window has now lost focus (go figure). Move the cursor outside of the window button. Now, the thumbnail previews pop up! Edit: Another bug... Using 7+ Taskbar Tweaker to make middle click close windows will have the thumbnail previews pop up as well... Too bad.

By the way, I tested with video recording software and using method one, tooltips show up after 0:00;12. Using method four, they show up after 0:01;02. It basically means that method one makes them instant, while method four holds them for a second, as is characteristic of normal tooltips.

So, thanks for the tip. It does come with a couple of not so great bugs.

I figured out how to do it! I'm talking about my post above. I must be the only one who knows how. It's necessary to use methods 1 and 4 in combination. In 7+ Taskbar Tweaker, set tooltips to show up on hover. On the other hand, set the registry as in step 4, but with the amount of time that tooltips should take to appear instead, which can be 1 or 2 seconds. Don't screw up editing the registry with the milliseconds and the decimal/hexadecimal thing. The couple of bugs that I mentioned in my previous post will still happen, but with tooltips instead and a bit differently, so they don't matter much.

There are loads of users out there on the internet asking about disabling the thumbnail previews... by the way.

I'm not sure what you mean since tooltips and thumbnail previews are two completely different settings.

Hello @KerBansot, and welcome to Seven Forums.

When you downloaded and merged the 100000ms_Taskbar_Thumbnail_Delay_Time.reg file from step 2 of Option 4, were you able to fully and successfully approve the merge at step 5?

If you like, you could also manually add the ExtendedUIHoverTime DWORD and set its decimal value to 100000.