Turn on or Off Thumbnail Display on Network Folders in Vista

There is a new Policy setting in Windows Vista which allows you disable the display of thumbnails on network folders in Windows Explorer. I don’t know if this speeds up the access of network folders, but thought I’d add this tip anyway.

In Windows Vista Business, Ultimate, and Enterprise editions, you can use the Group Policy Editor to configure this setting.

Disable Thumbnail display on Network folders

1. Click Start, type gpedit.msc and press ENTER

2. Go to the following branch:

User Configuration | Administrative Templates | Windows Components | Windows Explorer

3. Double-click the following option and set it to Enabled

Turn off the display of thumbnails and only display icons on network folders

4. Click OK.

If you enable this policy, Windows Explorer will only display icons and never display thumbnails on network folders.

Registry Fix

This setting can be configured using a Registry-based Policy. Download network-thumbs.zip. Unzip and extract the contents to a folder. Double-click the file disablenwthumb.reg to run it. Logoff and login back. To undo the setting, run the file enablenwthumb.reg.

The REG files adds data to the following branch:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Policies \ Explorer

Value Name : DisableThumbnailsOnNetworkFolders
Value Data : 1 or 0
Value Type : REG_DWORD