How in the Tech

Erasing the Aero Taskbar thumbnail display delay

By Adam Myers ⋅ June 28, 2010 ⋅ Tags: Customization, Vista, Windows 7

When Microsoft unveiled the Aero engine in Vista – and later expanded upon for 7 – it brought about a sea of usability and visual changes. While some changes were more just for eye candy, and perhaps trying to match what Apple was doing in OS X, others were more functionally based. Taskbar thumbnail previews probably straddles a bit of both sides; in Vista/7 hovering the mouse over the application window in your taskbar will result in a live thumbnail of the window contents. You’ve probably seen yourself the examples of a video file playing in real-time in the thumbnail.

I’m not positive my productivity and efficiency has increased whatsoever with this flare but I do know one thing that I find annoying – there is a slight delay, maybe not even 1 second in length, from when you mouse over the application and the thumbnail displays. It’s an odd behavior to have in my opinion, it results in the perception of the entire system appearing slow and bogged down. Interestingly, it’s not a limitation but rather a design decision to have the delay. While I’m sure there is some grounded rationale behind it, it makes little sense to me and the slight pause had me investigate how to remove the delay.

Launch the Registry Editor from Start->Search.

Traverse the tree down to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced.

Right-click in the right panel select New->DWORD and naming the key ExtendedUIHoverTime.

The value of ExtendedUIHoverTime will control the delay in the thumbnail display; the time is measured in milliseconds. Double-click the key and setting it to 1 will result in an instantaneous display. Logically, you could define the delay to something longer if you’d like.

Remember that you must log off and come back in to apply many registry settings, this one included!