Thumbwin was mentioned by a few readers in my Bring Order to your Desktop and Taskbar article which described a software called Minimize which allowed the user to display minimized windows as thumbnails. Thumbwin is apparently a software of choice for some of my readers and that is good enough for me to take a look at it and review it here at Ghacks.
What I like about Thumbwin is that it is easy to use and that its default settings are placing minimized windows in a more orderly fashion on the screen. Thumbnails can be dragged around as well and a single click brings the window back to the front. I agree that it feels more complete and that additional eye candy is also confirming that impression.
Thumbnail size and transparency can be changed in the programs settings. The settings offer several other options such as hotkeys, a blacklist that lists programs that will not be shown as a thumbnail and the default orientation and location of the thumbnails.
Like Minimize Thumbwin has difficulties with minimized media applications such as Gimp or an movie player. Instead of displaying the last frame it simply shows a black background mainly which does not look that good. Normal windows shortcuts such as Windows D or Windows M do not create thumbnails as well which can be countered by using a hotkey in Thumbwin instead.
Another difference between Thumbwin and Minimize is that Thumbwin does not remove the minimized windows from the Windows task bar while Minimize does remove them from there.
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Interesting. I’m running Minimize now, from reading your post yesterday, and I do like it. I actually prefer keeping some items off my start bar and others on.
Interesting but not stable enough. I was developping on Blackberry with some special IDE and thumbwin did a big big big system freeze. even the task manager was out.