Disable thumbnails in Windows XP?

Posted by quack quixote on Super User See other posts from Super User or by quack quixote
Published on 2010-04-21T01:59:38Z Indexed on 2010/04/21 2:03 UTC
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Filed under:

windows-xp

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windows-explorer

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video

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thumbnails

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disable

I regularly use Windows Explorer to browse my drives and data, and I notice little freezes and hiccups at times. It's especially noticable when browsing local or network folders with lots of video files (AVI, MKV, MPG, etc).

I almost always browse in Details view, and the "Do not cache thumbnails" option is turned on. Even though I'm in "Details" mode, I'm convinced the sluggishness is due to Windows trying to generate thumbnails for the video files, so I want to disable thumbnail generation for these files.

I occasionally use Thumbnails view for browsing image files, so I don't want to disable all thumbnails. But for future reference, this might be good to know.

So I have three questions about disabling Windows thumbnail generation:

How do I disable thumbnail generation for all non-image files?
How do I disable thumbnail generation for all files?
How do I disable thumbnail generation for one specific filetype?

And finally, how do I undo (re-enable thumbnails) once I've performed one of the above?

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