Taskbar Thumbnail Size Trick

If you only have one monitor and are playing a game with a tendency to lock up, it can be a pain to get it closed properly. For me, games like this end up covering up everything on the screen except the task bar, so while I can run Task Manager, I can’t see it, so closing the crashed game becomes a problem.

Here is a nifty trick to work around that issue: Change the size of the thumbnails you get in Windows 7 and Windows 8 when you put your mouse over an application in the taskbar. Normally these thumbnails are really small, but they are live representations of what is happening in the app/window, so they are usable if they are a bit larger.

Fire up Regedit and go to:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Taskband

Create a new 32-bit DWord here called “MinThumbSizePX” and set the value to whatever you like… I used 400. Log out and log back in, and you will now get resized thumbnails when mousing over taskbar items.

If you run Task Manager while a crashed game is taking up the screen (CTRL-ALT-DEL, select task manager) you can put your mouse over the taskbar and see the Task Manager window in the thumbnail. Arrow down to the crashed task and hit “Alt-E” to end the task.

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