How in the Tech

Adjusting Windows 7 Aero Peak display delay

By Adam Myers ⋅ October 26, 2009 ⋅ Tags: Customization, Windows 7

Microsoft has released Windows 7 and one of the useful features, that I find at least, is an addition to the Aero display framework introduced with Vista – Aero Peak. Aero Peak is actually an expansion of the Show Desktop quick launch icon in previous Windows iterations. When initiated, Aero Peak will display just the outlines of all open application windows which allows you to quickly peak at your Desktop. Aero Peak is activated by hovering to the right of your clock on your tray of the taskbar.

If you get into the habit of using this new feature you are likely to grow annoyed with the latency delay before Peak fires. Here’s how you can tweak the delay and it involves the Windows Registry.

Open regedit.exe from the Start Menu search or run box and navigate to the following registry entry from the left-hand tree view.

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

On the right-hand side look for the key DesktopLivePreviewHoverTime – if it doesn’t exist, like in my install, it can be created by right-clicking in that window and choosing New->DWORD Value.

Double-click on the key and change the value to the delay time you wish in milliseconds, ensuring that you are in decimal mode and not hex. A setting of 0 is no delay which is what I use. You’ll need to log off and on to apply the change.