Recent Items is a list of your recently used files on the right side of the Start Menu, Taskbar Windows Explorer icon link, in the Navigation Pane Recent Places, and in Jump Lists in Windows 7. If you’ve ever wondered how to configure the number of documents shown on the Recent Items menu, you’ve found the right article for Windows 7. The default value is set to show 10 documents, but you can increase that with a registry tweak.
What we are changing here is the amount of documents shown in this menu.
Manual Registry Tweak
Open up "regedit.exe" through the start menu search box, and then navigate down to the following key, creating it if it doesn’t exist.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer
Add a new DWORD 32-bit value named MaxRecentDocs into the right-hand pane, and then double-click to open it up.
To set the value, you’ll first need to change Base to Decimal, and then you can enter any value you want. For instance, if you want to set it to 50, enter that into the Value data field.
