Change Windows 7 Taskbar Thumbnail to List View Threshold 
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Microsoft has set the maxium to 16 or less depending on your resolution. This might be to high for many users. To lower it a quick registry edit is in order:
Open regedit and go to key, HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Taskband
add new DWORD (32-bit) Value “NumThumbnails” and choose the number you would prefer like 3 or 4.
Now close regedit and click the start button, hold down the ctrl and shift key and right click an empty area to get an exit explorer entry.
This exits explorer gracefully, instead of killing it in taskmanger. Then hold down ctrl+alt+del and click start taskmanger, then File > New Task (Run) and type explorer and OK.
Now the new settings should be working and you didn’t need to restart or log off.
ragie
January 3rd, 2010 at 11:51 pm
my taskbar dont view as thumbnails.. how to change it to view as thumbnail? ty
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DamnMachine
January 5th, 2010 at 7:58 am
Ragie: You are using windows 7?
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Joakim
January 15th, 2010 at 5:29 pm
Dear author - I salute you!
I finally did yet another search for disabling the thumbnail preview, this time changing my keywords slightly, and found your blogpost on Google. Ever since I purchased Windows 7 Professional (x64, build 7600) to replace my beta version, I’ve been looking to disable the taskbar thumbnails to replace them with the list view, and this is the first working solution I have found.
May the bandwidth God and his search engine spiders smile upon you.
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mkisaacs
February 22nd, 2010 at 4:31 pm
This is the only way I have determined to accomplish this. To disable thumbnails preview compeltely, set this value in the registry to 0. It will only display a thumbnail when there is one window in this case, which seems somewhat more acceptable.
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DamnMachine
February 24th, 2010 at 11:20 pm
If you want to disable the thumbnail previews try number 2 from here: http://damnmachine.com/309/windows-7-taskbar-reg-tweaks.html
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matt
June 18th, 2010 at 11:35 am
How do I go back from list view to thumbnails? I somehow changed it.
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DamnMachine
June 24th, 2010 at 9:42 am
Matt:
Did you try raising the number to 16?
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