You know those thumbnails that appear when you hold your cursor over an app in the Taskbar? You don’t have to have those always displayed, and this guide will show you how to disable the Taskbar App thumbnails.
Install Winaero Tweaker
- Head over to the download page for Winaero Tweaker and download the app. It’s a small file so the download won’t take very long. Once it’s done open the .zip file and extract the contents to your Downloads folder. From there, double-click the setup file to begin the installation. If you’re prompted with a “Windows protected your PC” screen, click the More info link.
- Click the Run anyway button. Winaero Tweaker is a popular program that has been downloaded countless times – it’s 100% safe to use.
- The rest of the installation is very straight forward – mostly you’ll just click ‘next’ a bunch of times. On the final screen, make sure that Run Winaero Tweaker is checked – you can remove the check from the Visit Winaero.com for latest news box – and click Finish
Configure Winaero Tweaker to Disable the Windows 10 Taskbar App Thumbnails
- In the navigation panel on the left side of the app locate the Desktop and Taskbar section and then select Taskbar Thumbnails from that list.
- Place a check in the box labelled Disable thumbnails completely
- Finally, click the Restart Explorer button. This will stop and then restart Explorer.exe, which is a way to ‘refresh’ the Taskbar.
- Now when you hover your cursor over any of the apps in your Taskbar, only the small description panel will be displayed – no more thumbnails.
- Take a look through the other options in Winaero Tweaker – there are a lot of them :) You can use it to restore the “old” volume control style in Windows 10 or increase the scrollbar size among many other things.
