A while back, I found myself annoyed when I accidently alt-tabbed to my desktop, minimizing a half-dozen windows that I’d positioned “just-so” over the last few hours.  I started searching for a way to remove “Desktop” from the new Windows 7 alt-tab menu, but found that this wasn’t directly possible. What IS possible, however, is simply removing the new-style alt-tab menu all together, and replacing it with the Windows XP style one, which has no “Desktop” choice at all.

I found a registry hack, over at annoyances.org, which instructs the user to modify the registry section HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Explorer and create a DWORD value called ”AltTabSettings” with a value of 1.  I’ve tested this on a few PCs, and it works flawlessly.

A few things to note:

• Since this hack modifies the HKEY_CURRENT_USER registry hive, it’s applied only to the user making the changes. You could modify other users’ registry settings, as well, though.
• Changing the AltTabSettings value to 0 disables the hack, and reverts to the standard Windows 7 behavior.
• I’d initially thought that I’d have to restart Explorer (or the computer completely) to make this take effect, but I found that the change is effective just as soon as the registry changes are saved.

On an interesting aside, Alt-tabbing to Desktop is directly analog to pressing Win+D (which is reversible by pressing Win+D again); It’s not like the Win+M shortcut, which minimizes all windows and is irreversible(save by restoring each window individually).

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Technology by Kevin