Turn Off Taskbar Pop-Ups in Windows 7+

February 23, 2015

Categorized: Workflow

Ever since I started on Windows 7, the little pop-ups you get over your taskbar when mousing down there annoyed me. I know they have a real name — but they aren’t really “previews” for me on Windows Classic, and they’re not really tooltips, either? They’re basically just pop-ups that allow me to close a window — which isn’t useful for me because I turn off collapsing.

Windows 7 taskbar pop-up.
Windows 7 taskbar pop-up.
I’ve searched for a way to turn them off a few times before, and I’ve tried certain things (e.g., playing with Windows services). They never seemed to work, though.

7 Taskbar Tweaker finally provided a way for me to get rid of these pop-ups. The only downside is having to run it when I don’t want the taskbar pop-ups (so basically, always). That said, it’s a tiny program and thus far I’ve encountered no issues with it affecting performance.

Another tweak offered by this program I enjoy is the pinned application behavior. I often accidentally click a pinned program — but pinning is useful enough to me that I don’t want to unpin everything and go without. So — I set 7TT to open pinned applications only on double-click. No more accidentally opening Photoshop!