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Windows 7 does not include a GUI to disable the taskbar thumbnail preview feature. I’ve experimented with the registry setting TaskbarNoThumbnail and its equivalent GPO Turn off taskbar thumbnails. That setting seems to apply only to Windows Vista, and has no effect in Windows 7.

You can however disable the taskbar thumbnail feature (sort of) in Windows 7 using a registry edit. This can be done by setting the taskbar thumbnail preview hover delay to a large value (say 10000 milliseconds or more), so that the preview is not immediately generated when you hover over a taskbar icon. Well. Then the article title should have really been "How To Delay Taskbar Thumbnail Preview in Windows 7".

I heard about this registry value via article Adjust Taskbar Preview Hover Delay at WinGeek.com (Credits to Steve Sinchak), and experimented the registry value by inputting a large decimal value to prevent immediate display of thumbnails in the Windows 7 Taskbar.

1. Click Start, type Regedit.exe and press {ENTER}

2. Navigate to the following location:

3. Create a new DWORD (32-bit) value named ExtendedUIHoverTime

4. Double-click ExtendedUIHoverTime and click Decimal

5. To increase the hover delay to 5 seconds, type 5000. Type 10000 for 10 seconds and so forth…

6. Exit the Registry Editor.

7. Logoff and login back, or restart the Shell ("Exit Explorer" method).

Related Article

Adjusting Aero Peek Desktop Preview Mouse Hover Delay in Windows 7.

Earlier we saw how to clear the search MRU entries in Windows 7. Are you one of those who find the Search Box suggestion pop-ups annoying, and don’t require this feature? Here is a registry edit which disables the search box suggestions in Windows Explorer.

1. Click Start, type Regedit.exe and press ENTER

2. Navigate to the following branch:

Note: The above key may not exist by default, and you may need to create the above branch manually.

3. Create a DWORD value named DisableSearchBoxSuggestions

4. Double-click DisableSearchBoxSuggestions and set its data as 1

5. Exit the Registry Editor.

This setting disables suggesting recent queries for the Search Box and prevents entries into the Search Box from being stored in the registry for future references.

Registry Fix

To automate the above download w7-disable-search-suggest.zip, unzip and run the enclosed REG file. To reverse the changes run the file undo.reg

Using the Group Policy Editor

This is only for Windows 7 editions that include the Group Policy Editor.

1. Launch the Group Policy Editor (gpedit.msc)

2. Navigate to the following branch:

3. Set Turn off display of recent search entries in the Windows Explorer search box to Enabled

4. Exit the Group Policy Editor.

Note: If you enable this policy, Windows Explorer will not show suggestion pop-ups as users type into the Search Box, and it will not store Search Box entries into the registry for future references. If the user types a property, values that match this property will be shown but no data will be saved in the registry or re-shown on subsequent uses of the search box.