How to Adjust Aero Peek Display Time in Windows 7
Here’s a nice Windows 7 tip from the How To Geek — with a little registry tweak you can adjust the how quickly or slowly Aero Peek thumbnails appear. By default, Aero Peek is programmed to show an application thumbnail when the mouse hovers over the app for a half second. That’s 500 milliseconds to the programmer types out there. And you can modify that 500 number by finding this registry key: HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerAdvanced
To mod the time, simply run type regedit in your Start menu to run the registry editor. Note: although this is a very minor change, it always makes sense to backup your registry before making any changes. You never know what might get hosed up and a backup can save the day.
Once you have the registry editor open, just navigate to the key path above. Look for and double-click on DesktopLivePreviewHoverTime, which should show the default value of 500. Here you can edit the Aero Peek delay time in terms of milliseconds: 1000 would be one second, 0 would be instant, etc… Not only will your live thumbnails appear faster — or slower, if you want — but the Show Desktop function in the far right of the Taskbar will follow the same time delay.
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Kevin, I have been following your Windows 7 postings and trying to take the step on installing it on my HTC shift. Do you have any general recommendations to follow in upgrading a machine as an HTC shift?
David, it looks like very little should or could go wrong with Windows 7 on the Shift. Mitchell over at Gear Diary gave it a try earlier this year and didn’t report any major problems: http://www.geardiary.com/2009/03/04/windows-7-on-the-htc-shift/ It should be like any other Windows 7 installation — I’d probably back up data and do a clean installation in lieu of an upgrade from Windows Vista, but that’s just my personal preference. If you give it go, let us know how it went!
I think there’s an error in this article. This registry hack doesn’t adjust “how quickly or slowly Aero Peek thumbnails appear”. If you follow the link to the article that you have, you’ll see that instead it just adjusts how quickly the “desktop preview” appears when you hover over the Show Desktop button in the lower-right.
It’s a shame, because I really want to adjust how quickly the Aero Peek thumbnails appear (I want them to show up instantaneously), but your article is the only one that I can find on the internet with info and unfortunately the method described here doesn’t work.