Disable Recent Documents History In Windows 7

Lifehacker AU

Don’t want anyone seeing what you’ve recently accessed on your Windows 7 PC? Reader Marz offers a handy registry hack to get rid of the document history.

Marz writes:

Over at Techie Corner, they have a nice tweak to disable the “recent documents history”. As you know in Windows7 it shows a list above the Explorer icon when you click-drag up. Well if you’re like me and share your computer with family and friends then you might not want a list of personal and confidential folders been displayed, so the tweak over there does the trick well. In Windows 7 though there is no key for ‘Explorer’ in the ‘Policies’ key, but all you have to do is add a key named ‘Explorer’ in it and then create the required DWORD Value. It works well!

My Windows 7 machine is in dry dock so I haven’t personally tested this, but it sounds like a useful tweak. Hit the post for the full details and let us know how it goes in the comments. Thanks Marz!

Disable Recent Documents History to get full privacy [Techie Corner]

Discuss

(3 Comments)
  • [–]

    cleverclogs

    Friday, August 21, 2009 at 1:26 PM

    Uh how about just right-clicking on the taskbar and settings “do not store recent documents”?

    • [–]

      Jeremy Fisher

      Thursday, March 15, 2012 at 4:50 PM

      Ha ha! Yep, that’ll do it! :)

  • [–]

    Anthony Long

    Monday, December 13, 2010 at 4:45 AM

    In windows 7 tried to find recent documents folder but looked on internet and could not fine it in startup, then found it by clicking on my name, links folder , then recent olaces, you can then delete what you want to

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