Microsoft is doing away with the shake to minimize feature in Windows 10

Shake to Minimize is an option within windows that first landed with Windows 7. It gave a user the ability to minimize everything on their desktop, keeping a single window of their choice open. You did so by grabbing the title bar (top ribbon) of a window with your mouse and shaking it back and forth causing everything else to drop down into the taskbar.

It’s a great feature if you keep a busy environment and just need to push everything away to focus on a single task quickly. At least, it sounds like an interesting idea in theory. Problem is, most people never really made use of the feature. If they did, they likely did it by accident. Which then had to one by one restore all of their windows back to where they were (assuming they didn’t know that they could reverse the action if they shook the same window soon after the initial act).

Microsoft has determined that the feature just was popular enough and has removed it from this month’s preview release of the operating system, which will likely roll out to the public sometime early next year.

It isn’t a surprise because we, ourselves, actually disable the option by default on most of our machines. We prefer to keep our busy environments busy since we rely on surrounding ourselves with data as we create new content. So many times have we accidentally triggered the feature as we quickly bounce between windows working at a fast pace. It can sometimes throw you off and completely put a stop to the zone you might have been in.

Of course, there will be those out there that have enjoyed the feature that will likely want it back. In which case, there is a way to do it by…

• Opening REGEDIT (Windows Registry)
• Head to: “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced“
• Create a DWORD (32-bit) value called “DisallowShaking”, setting it to “0”.

For those of you who didn’t know you could have disabled this whole time, you can do so via the same method, only you’d set the DWORD value to “1”. If you prefer to stay out of REGEDIT, you can also accomplish it by opening “gpedit.msc” within your run box (Windows key + R key on your keyboard). Head to “User Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Desktop”. Edit “Turn off Aero Shake window minimizing mouse gesture” and set it to disabled. That’s it! Given, in a number of months, the feature will be disabled for you anyway, so what’s a few more months after you’ve had it enabled for so long, right?