Resize Taskbar Thumbnails

Have you ever wished that Vista taskbar thumbnails were bigger? Joe Cassels shows how to make it so.


Vista’s Aero interface boasts the handy feature of thumbnail previews of each of the windows that you have open. As you hover the mouse pointer over each program’s taskbar button, the preview opens. These are real time images showing the contents of the window, including any video or animation. They may serve to remind you of what program is open, but the thumbnail is usually too small for you to be able to make out the window’s contents. Thumbnail Sizer enables you to change the size of the previews to however big you want.

The program is a standalone executable file provided in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. You don’t need to install the program, but you do need to launch it from within a folder that contains the rest of the contents of the downloaded zip file. You can opt to run the program whenever Windows starts by creating a shortcut to the executable file. Right click AveThumbnailSizer.exe, hold down the right hand mouse button and drag it to the desktop. Release the mouse button and choose Create Shortcut here. Drag this shortcut into the startup group of the start menu. The program does include an option to start it with Windows, but if you use the startup menu like this, you can more easily remove it by simply deleting the shortcut.

If you don’t have Vista, you can still enjoy taskbar thumbnails in Windows Xp by using Visual Tooltip, which is available from http://www.chrisnsoft.com/visual-tooltip/. Download to an accessible location and extract the zip file. Launch VisualToolTip.exe and select the language that you want to use. Click OK and hover your mouse over your taskbar buttons to see the thumbnails. You can resize these as well by clicking the VisualToolTip icon in the system tray and choosing Options. Move to the Thumbnails tab and adjust the sliders to produce the thumbnail size that you want. You can use VisalToolTip in Vista as well. The Display tab enables you to change the animation effect as a thumbnail appears and disappears. In the Dock tab you can enable an Apple OS style dock on top of the taskbar.

Use Thumbnail Sizer
Change the dimensions of the taskbar thumbnails with this clever utility



1
Browse to http://mpj.tomaatnet.nl/vista/ and download Thumbnail Sizer. You’ll need to extract the zip file to a suitable location on your hard drive. The file contains 32 and 64 bit versions of the program, select the one that you need and double click AveThumbnailSizer.


2
If you want to have the program constantly running in the background whenever you’re running Windows, choose Start AveVistaThumbnailSizer with Windows and follow the prompts. Use the sliders to alter the height and width of taskbar thumbnails.


3
Hover your mouse pointer over a taskbar button to see the preview thumbnail. Alter the sliders to change the size if necessary. Tick the box marked Add fade-in animation and use the third slider to set the fade duration.