Until last week I was thinking that increasing the taskbar thumbnail window size is not possible natively in Windows 7 (and Windows Vista). Well! Windows 7 supports the ability to increase the thumbnail preview size natively, through registry edits which I’m covering in this article.
This is how the taskbar thumbnail preview window appeared prior to applying the following edit.
Make the Taskbar Thumbnail Preview Bigger in Windows 7
1. Launch Regedit.exe and navigate to the following location:
2. Create a DWORD value named MinThumbSizePx
3. Double-click MinThumbSizePx and set its value data accordingly. I set it to 350 (Decimal) for this example.
4. Exit the Registry Editor.
5. Logoff and login back.
And you can see below that the taskbar thumbnails has grown bigger in size.
Additional Information
Similarly, you can tweak the following registry values under the "Taskband" registry branch, and customize the taskbar thumbnail previews as you need. Here is the entire list:
- NumThumbnails
- MinThumbSizePx
- MaxThumbSizePx
- TextHeightPx
- TopMarginPx
- LeftMarginPx
- RightMarginPx
- BottomMarginPx
- ThumbSpacingXPx
- ThumbSpacingYPx
Editor’s Note: Hoping to write an program to customize Windows 7 Taskbar Thumbnails based on the above registry edit. In Windows Vista, the feature was made available by a nice little program called Vista Thumbnail Sizer by Andreas Verhoeven, which was announced by the How-To Geek Website.
Related Posts
- How to Disable Taskbar Thumbnail Preview in Windows 7
- How to Adjust Aero Peek Desktop Preview Mouse Hover Delay in Windows 7
- Enable or Disable Thumbnail Preview for PDF Files
- Enable Thumbnail Support for .NEF File Type in Vista
- How to Clear the Thumbnail Cache in Windows 7 and Windows Vista
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There is a freeware tool that does this too:
http://www.thewindowsclub.com/taskbar-thumbnail-tweaker-resizer-for-windows-7-released
[...] If you’d prefer to change the settings manually without using a dedicated application, here’s a list of the registry changes you can make to accomplish this by [...]
@fung0: There is a way. See item #1 in “Related Posts”
What about ELIMINATING the stupid previews?? If you have a number of similar windows open at one time (as I always do — multiple Word documents are a good example), the preview just steals screen space and makes the text label more difficult to see. I’m going to play with your Registry settings… maybe I can reduce the preview to zero.