Win 7-style window previews from Taskbar hover

[CreosoteChris]

Hi Arris / everyone – and thanks for the great website.

I hace a machine with ASUS PK5PL-AM Quad Intel m/b, 4GB RAM, 1.5TB HDDs, multi-booting into W2K8R2 / Win 7 Ultimate / WinXP. W2K8 is my day-to-day OS, and I have the standard tweaks (Themes, Sidebar, Aero Cursors, Thumbnails in Windows Explorer, Boot Screen and Logon Screen) all installed and working.

Really love it – (nearly) all the interface features, + Hyper-V with enough horsepower to run guest OSes – but one little thing bugs me.

I wish I had the ability to hover my mouse over the taskbar and see the miniature previews of runnning windows / apps that are there in Windows 7. On the same machine the Win 7 installation they show up fine, and I’ve been through the Advanced – Advanced – Performance settings and Taskbar Properties to no avail.

Kinda surprised not to find this on the wish-list or discussed in another topic (if my searches missed a topic, apologies)

Can anyone advise?

Thanks

Chris, Manchester UK

[halladayrules]

I believe you are referring to Aero Peek, which is included in the Desktop Experience package. Try this. Go to Start, and choose run. Type in “systempropertiesperformance” without quotes and hit enter. Ensure that the Visual Effects tab is selected. Change your settings to “Adjust for best performance”, hit apply. Now change the setting back to “Adjust for best appearance”. Now right-click on the desktop and choose “Personalize”. Apply a theme package to enable Windows Aero. See if Aero Peek is enabled now.

[CreosoteChris]

Hi halladayrules, thanks for the response……

…..tried it, unfortunately it didn’t work. Followed your instructions, + changed my theme from my fave (Bing Japan) to the one that my Win 7 runs (UK). Still no previews.

Note additionally that the Taskbar properties, Taskbar tab, has a check-box entitled “Preview desktop with Aero Peek”. The box is greyed out but checked, so it seems kinda like “should be working but in this case isn’t supported”

Maybe something to do with the video drivers,I’ll reboot into Win 7 and have a dig around.

Regards Chris

[halladayrules]

I was going through the registry for searches regarding “aero peek” and i come across this key.

HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsDWM

Name: EnableAeroPeek
Type: REG_DWORD
Value: 1

Check to see if it has a value of 1. If it is set to 0, switch it back to 1. After this go to command prompt, type in following:

taskkill /f /im explorer.exe
start explorer

This will refresh Windows Explorer so you don’t have to restart. Hopefully this works.

[CreosoteChris]

Thanks for your continued interest and fast responses halladayrules……

…. I really thought you’d cracked it there, but still no joy I’m afraid. I found that the DWM value was actually 0, but changing it and killing / restarting Explorer didn’t make any difference. Just to be certain, I even tried rebooting the box, no difference.

For clarity (and this has always been the case I think), when I hover over the Taskbar I get rectangular boxes decribing the windows / IE tabs etc (i don’t get nothing). Taskbar properties “Use Aero Peek to preview the desktop” check box still checked and greyed out.

Anyway, cheers for trying, look forward to any further ideas and I’ll post if I manage to get to the bottom of it.

Regards Chris

[halladayrules]

Is your graphics adapter ATI? It might have something to do with the Catalyst Control Center. Trying completely uninstalling your graphics driver and software. Then re-install ONLY the display driver (not the CCC). See if it works.

[CreosoteChris]

Nearly there…….

Check this thread: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7itproui/thread/ed2b6c41-4cb4-4c0b-a072-a72f71071d61

I changed from High Colour to True Colour, and voila! – the previews were there, the Taskbar check-box wasn’t greyed out….. but I had the distinct impression that I was paying a performance penalty. So I started messing with the System Properties…. after switching things around a few times, I now have a True Colur setup and the Taskbar box is greyed and unchecked…..

Anyway I’ll get it to my preferred state in due course – My Win 7 instance seems to run Aero Peek with no feeling of “I’m taking a performance hit” so I’ll examine that again.

Regards Chris

[CreosoteChris]

OK, just to finish this thread off……
…… after trying stuff out for a while, booting in and out of Win 7 and 2K8, I eventually realised several things:

1) I wasn’t just missing the Aero Peek previews in W2K8, I was missing the whole Aero “glass” thing. I know this sounds a bit dumb, but my day-job is server engineeer, and I’ve never had experience before of messsing wirth user interfaces, never had up-to-date hardware or OSes at home till recently.

2) Whether or not I could get full-feature Aero on my W2K8 setup depended on the colour depth – unless I went into True Colour, there was no “glass”. And when I did that, the interface slowed down horribly. Window resizes were painfully slow, but even menus / favourites / Aero Peek popups etc, were all really sluggish for an up-to-date quad-core PC.

2) My Win 7 setup was just A-OK, felt really responsive in full-feature Aero.

It began to annoy me, and (shamefully) I took the easy way out….. bought a cheap PCI-E graphics card and installed that.

All OSes now updated and working just great with bfull interface features.

Regards Chris

[halladayrules]

So let me sum up your job in a few words…

Don’t touch my server! You touch my server I break your fingers. hehe jk

I’d really like to know more about what exactly you do. Maybe you could answer a few questions for me.

1. What type of network topology do you use? (bus, star, ring, IP VPN, MPLS?)

2. What type of medium do you use? (Fiber, cat5e, cat6, ?)

3. What is your role in terms of AD?

4. What type of tools do you commonly use to diagnose problems with the network? It can be connection problem (physically), authentication issue, diagnosing failed hardware? Maybe you can enlighten me on what IT people in the field use.

5. How much does your business depend on virtualization?

6. What type of disaster recovery plan do you use? Do you outsource any of your online backups to Iron Mountain or any other remote sites like that? What things do you implement to ensure data integrity?

[CreosoteChris]

Hello halladayrules

You’re in luck, I have 30 mins before I go and see a movie (Easy Rider, whioxh I’ve never seen, yay!)

I work for a finanicial institution, where I am one of a team running a very large Wintel (almost entirely W2K3) infrastructure used for hosting secure financial applications, Inter and Intra nets). The Wintel systems are the front-end, presentation layer of large n-tier apps, the business data is held by mainframes and UNIX systems.

Don’t touch my server! You touch my server I break your fingers. hehe jk

Actually pretty close to the truth. The servers are built, end-to-end, by deployment scripts. No manual changes are allowed except in the most exceptional circumstances, everything is change-controlled to the nth degree. Unauthorised changes to live systems are pretty close to being a sacking offence.

I’d really like to know more about what exactly you do. Maybe you could answer a few questions for me.
1. What type of network topology do you use? (bus, star, ring, IP VPN, MPLS?)

Basically 100Mbps Ethernet, Gigabit where necessary and increasingly Gig for net stuff we introduce. The toplogy is complex, I don’t really have much clarity about it, that’s down to the network teams

2. What type of medium do you use? (Fiber, cat5e, cat6, ?)

Nearly all Cat5 as far as I know, but again I don’t have visibility

3. What is your role in terms of AD?

The AD specialists deal with that, I have privileged access and can see it but don’t mess with it.. The ADs are very different for Inter and Intra purposes: the Intranet ones are pretty standard large ADs (hugely complex internal structures and Group Policy setups) The Inter one is tree-structured with the DMZ-resident web servers in child domains using one-way trusts. So if one child gets hacked, the compromise should be limited to that child domain (it’s never happened so far)

4. What type of tools do you commonly use to diagnose problems with the network? It can be connection problem (physically), authentication issue, diagnosing failed hardware? Maybe you can enlighten me on what IT people in the field use.

For the Wintel systems, hardware is monitored via use of suppliers proprietary utils (Dell OpenManage, HP Insight) which put events into the Windows event logs. The ELs are parsed by IBM Tivoli which then sends alerts to the support teams. Authentication issues inside an n-tier app will almost certainly show up as application-level failures which get reported by users, or by the HP Transbac systems (which imitate users logging on and exercising the apps, again alerting through Tivoli). Connectivity issues are similar, they show up as app failures, support teams investigate and tell the network teams “I suspect…”

5. How much does your business depend on virtualization?

It’s currently a mad scramble to implement as fast as poss, for large organisations you have to do it or the explosion of live and test hardware has really severe consequences – like filling up your datacentre and needing a extra one (think £0.5 billion approx). Currently virtualising (on VMWare) the Intra stuff like mad, not yet started rolling it out for the Internet-facing apps but that’s coming soon.

6. What type of disaster recovery plan do you use? Do you outsource any of your online backups to Iron Mountain or any other remote sites like that? What things do you implement to ensure data integrity?

The main DR capability is use of two fibre-linked geographically remote datacentres (around 20 miles apart) with *everything* duplicated to the extent that the entire setup could work from one of them. I presume that there are plenty of offsite backups but don’t have visibility, that’s the storage guys’ job. It’s not outsourced. Data integrity – dunno really, my bit is just front-end hosting for the real business data which lives in the glass house. I’d like to think that the best guarantee of data integrity is (no surprise) regular, verified, tested backups. Certainly works forthe platform-level data (IIS logs, event logs,etc) I deal with

[CreosoteChris]

By the way Arris, this BB software is awful when you do long posts – I had to do the one above in WordPad then paste it in, by the time ! got past 30 or 40 lines of post, the scrolling in the edit window didn’t work properly at all.

Regards Chris

[halladayrules]

Thanks for the input Chris. Great feedback. Hopefully by the year 2039 a Megatron-type robot built from a RAID 5+1 configuration, a terabyte of memory, a 25.0 Petahertz CPU processor that will wreck havoc on anyone attempting to “compromise” your data. The robot will find the exact location of the perpetrator and then lift him up by his hands and squeeze him by his “you know whats” and then impose a question. “Do you wish to have children?” Accept or reject. 😆

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