When I have a number of similar windows opens, for example, multiple explorer windows, they are all grouped into the same icon on the taskbar. When I hover over this I get a thumbnail of the window, and a piece of truncated text which is supposed to help me work out what that window is.
However I also like to have the full path shown in explorer windows, so the truncated text is usually C:\CommonPathToEveryWind...
I have noticed that if I have over 14 explorer windows open, then Windows gives up trying to display these useless thumbnails, and instead gives me a nicely formatted list of paths.
My question is how can I customise this behaviour, to either disable thumbnails all together for a subset of applications where a thumbnail is inappropriate (explorer, 'Everything'); or to lower the max number of thumbnails per grouped taskbar icon to 2; or just to disable thumbnails all together, (without loosing the entire windows theme)
Edit: Just to make it clear what I currently get, and what I actually want. I do still want to keep the grouping behaviour, so that multiple instances of the same program, Explorer for example, only take one slot on the taskbar. What I want is to alter what is displayed when I hover over the grouped icon:
What I actually see - useless thumbnails:-
The style I want for any number of instances:-
Found the answer I was looking for here:
This can be done.
- open regedit
- navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Taskband right-click on the empty space in the right-hand pane and create new DWORD value set the name to NumThumbnails
- double-click the value and set it to the maximum number of thumbnails you want to see
- close regedit, log off and log on again
That should do it. Note that you cannot completely disable thumbnails - setting the value to 0 is the same as setting it to 1.