Guru Needed

[stoutfellow]

This is, admittedly, a miniscule, even infinitesimal problem, but I'd much appreciate any help that can be offered.

One of the things I liked about Windows 7, when I bought the new computer, was its handling of minimized windows. Their icons are visible on the status bar, and - until recently - mousing over them brought forth miniaturized versions of the windows. Thus, for example, if I had music playing on WMP in the background, I could pause or restart it without opening the window to full size. This seems to have stopped; now, mouseover elicits, at most, the name of the program or window - or, in the case of WMP, the name of the music currently playing. I've looked in all the obvious places in the Control Panel, but haven't found any way to set this particular preference. Does anybody know?

Comments

[trixtah]

Is the Aero display engine still enabled?

If so, right-click on Computer in the start menu, then go to Properties > Advanced System Settings. Under Performance, click Settings, and you should then see the Visual Effects tab. In there, everything should be enabled (except "Save taskbar thumbnail previews"), and specifically "Enable Aero Peek" (which is the pop-up previews in the taskbar).

You'll probably need to reboot to apply any visual effects configuration changes you make.

[stoutfellow]

It turned out that rebooting solved the problem. My suspicion is that playing Civilization was to blame; the program seems to have a major memory-leak problem, and odd things do seem to follow after I play it a few times without a reboot.

Thanks, in any case; I'll know where to look next time.

[trixtah]

Oh, yes, I've had various games crash Aero, so that's not unusual. Since I shut down my machine every time I walk away from it for more than 15 minutes, the problem solves itself. :-)

I wouldn't bother fiddling around with those settings if Aero is out of action - reboots are quicker and easier.