How to Adjust Taskbar Thumbnail Live Preview Delay Time in Windows 7

Recently we posted about adjusting Taskbar thumbnail delay time. In Windows 7, whenever you hover your mouse cursor over a running application's button in Taskbar, Windows shows a small thumbnail of running application with a close button.

And if you hover your mouse cursor over the small thumbnail, Windows shows a live preview of the running application and makes all other running applications windows transparent.

Today we are sharing a small registry trick which can be used to adjust the live preview delay time. You can set the delay time to 1000 milliseconds (or 1 second) to get the live previews faster.

So here we start the tutorial:

1. Type regedit in RUN or Startmenu Searchbox and press Enter. It'll open Registry Editor.

2. Now go to following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced

3. In right-side pane, create a new DWORD value ThumbnailLivePreviewHoverTime

4. Now you'll need to set its value to your desired delay time. Double-click on it and select "Base" as Decimal and enter the desired value. Remember the value should be given in milliseconds. Set the value to 1000 for best experience.

You can use any value but it should be greater than 0.

5. That's it. Log off or restart your system to take effect.

NOTE: If you want to restore default settings, simply delete "ThumbnailLivePreviewHoverTime" DWORD value created in Step 3.

PS: If you want a ready-made script to do the task automatically, download following ZIP file, extract it and run the extracted REG file. It'll ask for confirmation, accept it:

Download Registry Script