Change Taskbar Window Selection Behavior to Open Last Used Program with a Single Click

When you have your icons combined and have multiple programs on your taskbar, you might minimize your program to go to a different program or to look something up in a different window. When you want to return to your previous program, you click on the icon and get a selection of which one you want to switch to. Sure, you can press CTRL and click to open the last window you were working on, but you can change the default Windows behavior to automatically switch to the last window using a single click. Here’s how.

1. Open regedit (Start, type regedit.exe and press enter).

2. Navigate to HKCUSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerAdvanced


3. Create a new DWORD (32-Bit) and name it LastActiveClick and modify the value to a “1”.

4. Restart Explorer, or reboot. To restart explorer, open Task Manager (Right click taskbar, click “Start Task Manager”. Right click the explorer.exe process, and select “End Process”. Then click File, then New Task… type explorer.exe and press enter.

5. Now when you click on your window, it will go to where you were last working. This is great for us that have multiple windows open doing a lot of multitasking, and looking for shortcuts to make it easier and more efficient.