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How to Disable Recent Documents History in Start menu

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When you click Start > Documents menu, you find a list of documents that are accessed most recently. This feature provides shortcuts for people to open recent documents, but may also be undesirable for people who are concerned about their privacy. Windows does not provide direct user interface for you to disable or enable this feature. To do this, you have to edit your system Registry either directly or by using some third party utility.

To disable Recent Documents History by editing system Registry, please follow these steps.

1. Click Start, then click Run, type "regedit" to open Registry Editor.
2. In Registry Editor, expand the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE.
3. Then locate and expand Software > Microsoft > Windows > CurrentVersion.
4. Locate the key policies, right click on it and select New > Key to create a new key. Name the new key Explore.
5. Right click the key Explore, select New > DWORD value to create a new value. Rename the new value to NoRecentDocsHistory.
6. Double click the value NoRecentDocsHistory, and change the value data to 1.
7. Exit the Registry Editor.
8. Reboot the computer to make the change take effect.
9. Done.

To enable the recent document list, you need simply edit the value of NoRecentDocsHistory to 0 and reboot the system.