If you frequently access “recent items” on your Windows 7 Start menu, you might want to consider adding more recent items than “only” 15 items. This is a quick registry hack that allows you to increase the recent items from 15 to 25!
Increase Recent Items via .reg file
You can download the registry hack from here or simply insert the following text into notepad and save it as a “.reg” file:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies]
“MaxRecentDocs”=dword:00000019[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer]
“MaxRecentDocs”=dword:00000000
Increase Recent Items manually
1. Step Click on “Start” and enter “regedit.exe” into the search field
2. Step Uncollapse [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer]
Important: If the folder Explorer does not exist, create it! Simply right-click on “Policies”, “New”, “Key”.
3. Step Create a new DWORD-key with the name “MaxRecentDocs” and enter a value between 0 and 25 (depending on the amount of items you want on the recent items list).
Right-click in the right pane and select “New” – “DWORD”:
Select “decimal” and enter the value 25.
Important: The limit for each filetype will still be 10! So, overall you will have 25 entries from now on, but only 10 of each filetype, e.g. 10 .jpg files.
I’m on a Windows 7 64 bit OS. THIS DID NOT WORK FOR ME.
I’m also on 64-bit. Are you on Professional?
Anyway, if you follow the first way, try to replace the “ with real double quotes ” because they are not displayed correctly on this site.
I would do it manually and double-check that everything is correct. Keep in mind its all case-sensitive.
Adding the “Explorer” Key to Policies, as shown in the manual steps, works on Win 7 64-bit Home Edition. I used DWORD and set mine to 50. Right Click>Modify>Decimal>50