How to get large Taskbar previews on Windows 10
One of the neatest features on Windows is that when you hover you mouse over the taskbar icon of a minimized or background window, you can preview it in a tiny little window. This feature is light-weight and incredibly useful however, for some users, the preview window might be too small to be of any use. If you’d prefer large taskbar previews instead of the rather small ones, you can make a small registry edit to make them bigger.
Large Taskbar previews
This requires editing the Windows registry so you will need admin rights. Open the Windows registry editor by tapping the Win+R keyboard shortcut and entering regedit in the run box that opens. Alternatively, you can also use Windows search to look for ‘regedit’.
Once you have the registry editor open, go to the following location. You can enter it in the location bar at the top and tap enter to jump straight to it.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Taskband
Right-click the Taskband key, and from the context menu select New>DWORD(32-bit)Value. Name the value;
MinThumbSizePx
Once it’s been created, double-click it and set its value to anything below 500. After you set the value, click OK. The value will change to a different number once you click OK but you don’t need to worry about it. Close the registry editor.
You now need to restart File Explorer. There are different ways to do this but the quickest method is to open Task Manager and look for Windows Explorer. Select it, and click the Restart button at the bottom right.
Once File Explorer restarts, you will get larger preview windows for all minimized or background windows.
You will need to experiment with the number you enter for the DWORD value. The preview in the screenshot above was a result of setting the value to 450. You can go higher, or lower depending on what’s comfortable for you to use. The value is relative to your screen resolution so you don’t have to worry about a certain value being ‘too small’ because you have a HD display. Remember to keep the largest value under 500. You cannot use this DWORD value to make the preview windows smaller than their default size. Setting the value to 0 will make it as though you never added the value to begin with.
The new preview size will work for both desktop and UWP apps though, in some rare cases the preview window might still remain small.
If you ever want to go back to the original preview size, just delete the key you created and restart explorer.exe.
You have published a tip on setting the number of peek preview items to be shown (registry tweek). Is there a way to sort the list shown, e.g. on the file suffix. Would be very handy for switching windows in a development environment, to distinguish the functions from the tables.