01Oct How to disable Recent Documents History?

Microsoft Windows XP has a very useful feature called as Recent Documents. In this the windows stores shortcut to every document in “C:\Documents and Settings\[user]\Recent\” which the user had open in the past. You can quickly reopen the documents recently used by going to Star then to “My Recent Documents”, and you can get your document in a moment. People uses many documents per day and never uses this tool, now they can keep up with what they want without Windows XP doing it for them.

The negative side of this is that, whenever Windows XP starts it has to calculate what all documents need to placed in the recent documents. The two disadvantages are that it takes a lot of time and the other is after a long use it takes a lot of disk space to store all the shortcuts in the above mentioned directory. If you never use the recent documents history, then it’s good to disable it. One needs to perform following process to disable this:-

1. Open the Registry Editor (Start>>Run>>regedit.exe>>OK).
2. Browse to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer.
3. Create a NoRecentDocsHistory D_WORD key. When it is created, double-click to open it.
4. Set the Data Value to 1 to enable the restriction.
5. Click OK. Close the editor.
6. Restart the Windows for changes to take effect.