Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Tweak Windows XP - Disable Thumbnail Cache


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Windows XP has a elegant feature for image and video files that creates a "thumbnail" of the image and the very first frame of the video file and then put this captured frame or image as the icon for the file. Windows Explorer can do this thing in two different ways. Firstly, by making the thumbnail at each time you open the respective folder and secondly, by loading the thumbnail from previously saved thumbnails which are placed in the cache which we call thumbnail cache. With the passage of time, system has a large collection of the thumbnails or very large cache memory for them. So in order to increase the opening time of the folders you have to delete this cached memory.


[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced]
"DisableThumbnailCache"=dword:00000001

 

To disable the Thumbnail Cache: 

  • Open Registry Editor from Satrt | Run | regedit
  • Browse to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced and
  • Find the DWORD "DisableThumbnailCache"
  • Sometimes you may need to create this key. 
  • For systems where the number of graphic and video files is large, a setting of 1 is recommended and a setting of 0 is recommended for systems which have no concerns about hard drive space, as loading the files from the cache is significantly faster than creating them each time when a folder is accessed.

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