Fixing the Windows 7 64bit Preview Pane for PDFs

I installed Windows 7 64bit edition a few weeks ago and I’m loving it. But one of the things that’s been bugging me for ages is that the “Preview Pane” doesn’t recognise PDFs, even with a full version of Adobe Acrobat installed. As I have a quite a lot of PDFs on my hard drive I sometimes have to plough through them all individually to find the one that I want…but if the preview pane was working properly my working life would be a heck of a lot more efficient.

But now I’ve found the fix…and it’s an easy one…

Techie Version:

Some text:

1. Open RegEdit and navigate to:
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Classes\CLSID\{DC6EFB56-9CFA-464D-8880-44885D7DC193}
2. Change the AppID value to:
   {534A1E02-D58F-44f0-B58B-36CBED287C7C}
3. Test. It should work immediately.

Non-techie Version:

1. Click on the “start menu”
2. Type “regedit” into the search box and hit return
3. In the left hand pane open the following folders:HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
   then SOFTWARE
   then Wow6432Node
   then Classes
   then CLSID
   
4. Now find and click on the following folder:
   {DC6EFB56-9CFA-464D-8880-44885D7DC193}

5. On the right hand side you should see a number of files appear. Mine showed four in total. Right hand click on AppID and select “Modify”
6. Delete the contents of the box and then copy and paste the following into it instead:
   {534A1E02-D58F-44f0-B58B-36CBED287C7C}
   
7. When you click OK, you should now be able to view PDFs using the preview pane. click on and off a PDF a couple of times with the preview pane open.

Hope that helps someone!

Please note: Although I know that this worked perfectly fine with my machine, I can make no guarantees that it will work with yours. By doing this you are altering your computer’s registry…I cannot accept responsibility if anything goes wrong as a result of doing so. I am merely offering this help for those that are confident enough to try.