Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Speed up your computer by disabling the Thumbnail Previews


If you are suffering from a slower computer and would like to speed it up with some easy to do hacks, you can consider Turning off Windows Messenger and improve your PC Performance and speeding up your folder browsing. The buck however doesnt stop here, you can still improve the performance of your computer by disabling Thumbnail Previews for speedier computer browsing. 

It would be of interest to know that the process to show the thumbnail preview may slow down the file listing process when opening folder with large video files. Thumbnail previewing usually causes slower PC performance owing to the errors  which might happen because Windows needs a proper codec in order to correctly and validly create a thumbnail for video media. Without the presence of a codec, or in a situation where codec is broken or buggy, generating a thumbnail for the media file will have problem. 
This article describes a step by step process for disabling Thumbnail previews for faster computer browsing. Follow the steps below to disable thumbnail previews for a faster computer experience.
The below mentioned process makes use of a simple hack which effectively makes use of regsvr32. regsvr32 is a command-line utility in Microsoft Windows operating systems for registering and unregistering DLLs and ActiveX controls in the Windows Registry. Using the hack mentioned below, we de-register the associated DLLs which control the preview generation for the specific files. Once the DLLs are de-registered, the thumbnail preview generation process is not initialized.
Disable Thumbnail Preview of Video and Media Files
1.) Click on Start –> Run


Image: Disabling Thumbnail Preview Generation for Video Files
2.) Type in regsvr32 /u shmedia.dll for disabling thumbnail preview for video and media files. This will disable the thumbnail preview generation for video and other media files.
In order to restart the thumbnail preview generation process, type regsvr32 shmedia.dll at Run and re-open the folder.
Disable Thumbnail Preview of Images
1.) Click Start –> Run. 


Image: De-registering DLL for disabling thumbnail preview generation for images.
2.) At Run type regsvr32 /u shimgvw.dll to disable thumbnail preview generation of images.
In order to re-enable thumbnail preview generation of images, type regsvr32 shmedia.dll at Run and refresh or re-open the folder. This will again register the DLL shimgvw.dll with the registry and thus allowing for thumbnail generation for image type files.
This above hack will help you definitely speed up your computer and also avoid it from getting crashed in case of a corrupted file/ missing codec which at times can even lead to 100% CPU utilization.

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