The taskbar thumbnails in Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8 allow you to have a preview of all the open applications without actually bringing them up onto the desktop. This is especially useful when you have multiple windows of the same application open at the same time. For instance, if you have a lot of instances of Windows Explorer open on your desktop, switching between each one of them in order to find out which one you want to bring up is probably going to take a lot of time. Using taskbar thumbnails, you can easily get an idea about the content within each, and you can just click the thumbnail of the required window to bring it up. However, any version of Windows does not allow you to tweak the thumbnails according to your preference, and you are forced to use the default settings for the preview. Taskbar Thumbnails Tuner is a portable application for Windows 8 that allows you to change various appearance settings for the taskbar thumbnails, including Thumbnail Size, Number of Thumbnails in Group, Horizontal/ Vertical Spacing Between Thumbnails, Margins etc. Keep reading to find out more about this useful tweaker.

When you run the application for the first time, the Windows 8 SmartScreen might prevent it from running because of the app being unrecognized. Click More info to ignore the notification, and choose Run Anyway to ignore the notification and run the application . You might have to do this with almost all third party applications, since they are not recognized by Windows 8.

The application provides you with sliders to increase or decrease various settings for the Thumbnails. There are two tabs at the top, namely General and Margins. The General tab contains options to increase and decrease the Thumbnail Size, Number of Thumbnails in Group, Horizontal Spacing Between the Thumbnails, Vertical Spacing Between the thumbnails, Show Delay (in milliseconds) and Text Position(depends on Top Margin). Each setting can be tweaked using either the slider, or the text input for increasing and decreasing the settings. You can even permanently disable the taskbar thumbnails preview by marking the Disable Thumbnails check box. Click Apply when all settings are done.

The Margins tab lets you change the Top Margin, Left Margin, Right Margin and Bottom Margin fromSmall to Large. Click Defaults button to bring all the settings back to their original state. 

You can tweak the thumbnails to your heart’s content. In the following screenshot, we made the thumbnails larger than usual, with more spacing between them.

Taskbar Thumbnail Tuner works on both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8.

Download taskbar Thumbnail Tuner

Source: addictivetips