It was only a matter of time before people started cloning Windows Vista features and adding them into Windows XP. One of my favorite Vista features is the thumbnails that popup when you mouse over the taskbar. And now I can use them in XP as well.

The utility we’ll use is called Visual Tooltip, which is a hybrid dock / thumbnail applicaton. With a few tweaks to the settings, we can make it work just like Vista thumbnails.

Here’s what it looks like on my desktop… pretty sweet!

To make your thumbnails look the same as mine, just follow these couple of steps. Download and start the application, and open up the options from the tray icon.

Increase the size of the sliders to make the thumbnail bigger, and then uncheck the option for “Size proportional to the target window”.

Click on the Display tab, and then uncheck the “Show window title”

 

That’s all there is to it.

Download Visual Tooltip 2.1

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Lowell is the founder and CEO of How-To Geek. He’s been running the show since creating the site back in 2006. Over the last decade, Lowell has personally written more than 1000 articles which have been viewed by over 250 million people. Prior to starting How-To Geek, Lowell spent 15 years working in IT doing consulting, cybersecurity, database management, and programming work.
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