Disable or delay Alt+Tab Aero Peek effect in Windows 7
In Windows 7 pressing Alt+Tab shows the transparent windows (Aero) effect. The screen change is distracting while I'm trying to figure out which window to switch to based on the thumbnail preview (which is sufficient for me most of the time). Is there any way to turn off the Aero Peek effect or delay its activation to something like 6 seconds or so?
On the Taskbar the Aero Peek effect is brought up on-demand when I mouse over the actual thumbnails. This behavior is not an issue and if I have a choice, I do not want it to be turned off.
Solution 1:
You might find vistaswitcher more to your liking. It gives an instant preview box mid-screen (configurable), without doing the slow transparency fade. Try it!
Solution 2:
There is no way to properly disable aero peek for just alt-tab, but you can set the delay to an absurdly high value, effectively disabling it. There is another post detailing this process. Essentially, you need to create the DWORD value LivePreview_ms in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\AltTab to a very large number. This key stores the time in milliseconds to delay, so 60000 ought to be enough, since I doubt you hold alt-tab for more than a minute.
Note that setting the registry key to 0 disables Aero-peek for Alt-Tab entirely.
You have to log out and in again for the change to take effect.
Solution 3:
You can fix this in performance; I had the same issue. It's not "our brain having problems," it's crappy usability due to feature bloat. Alt-tab was more or less perfect in Vista.
Go into Adjust Visual Effects (from Performance in the Control Panel) and uncheck Aero Peek.
Solution 4:
Another trick you can do is use the "old" alt-tab that is present in Windows 7:
- Hold down the left alt key
- Tap the right alt key
- Still holding the left alt, use the tab key as you would normally to cycle through tasks
You'll notice that this uses the old alt-tab style switcher and does not fade out windows for you.