The Taskbar Preview is one of the additional details of Windows Vista. One interesting thing about this feature is you can increase or decrease its size. And this is made possible by the Thumbnail Resizer tool. Aside from resizing the Taskbar Preview, the tool also adds a fade-in animation.
The default Vista Taskbar Preview setting looks like this:
The screenshot below shows a Taskbar Preview at its maximum width and height (1024 x 1024). You can decrease the size based on your preference. Another feature is that the Thumbnail Resizer uses the compositing engine built into Vista. If you are watching a video, you can continue watching it through the live Taskbar Preview.
Installation Instruction
The first thing you need to do is download the file which is in Zip form, thus you need to unzip it. Open the unzip file and open the 32 bits or 64 bits folder (choose the right one based on your Vista version). Double click the AveThumbnailSizer.exe and the Vista ThumbnailSizer window appears (screenshot below). You can adjust the Preview dimensions based on your preference. You can also adjust the duration of your fade-in animation.
For this software to work, the following requirements have to be satisfied:
Start the software to start the process.
The system must be run as explorer.exe and not as administrator.
DWM.exe (Aero) is running. Live Taskbar previews only work when Aero is enabled and it does not work if your theme is Vista basic.
This application does not automatically open every time you restart you computer; however, there is a way to remedy this problem. The first thing you need to do is make a shortcut of vistathumbnailsizer.exe. The second step is to copy the shortcut to the startup folder. Then right click on the shortcut and open its properties and add -hide at the end of the Target box as shown in the screenshot below.
Try to restart your computer and your previous Taskbar Preview setting should have been restored. If you want to change the taskbar preview size, open the application and adjust.
There are other commands that are also usable by the tool: 1) -kill (Kills the application), 2) –show (Brings up the dialog window (default), 3) –nohook (Starts the dialog but doesn’t add the effects) and 4) –hide (Start up but don’t display the dialog).
Thumbnail Resizer is a great addition to the Windows Vista details, thus the time you spent to install it is worthwhile.
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