From what I understand windows should show the last 15 recently accessed files.
Looking at a drive through encase, I see 235 recently accessed files, last accessed shows over a period of 3 years. (Within the recently accessed folder not registry)
Investigating OS XP 5.1 SP3
What is the accuracy to say these are the only files on this system over the last 3 years? (Subject to manual user deletion)
Additionally, does anyone have a technical explanation why 235 files are shown and not the standard 15?
Kind Regards
None of them are deleted? Which path are you looking into for saying they are the Recent Documents? (not that I doubt you are doing it properly, just to check wink )
None deleted/over written, path? the recent folder within a user profile.
I just had a reply on another forum..i shall put it here for reference
"
You could run gpedit.msc as administrator and navigate to User Configuration\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Windows Explorer. Double-click Maximum Number of Recent Documents in the right pane and you should be good to go
or
you could do a registry hack by going to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Policies. In the left side panel, click right to create a new Key value with the name Explorer under “Policies” area. Then go to [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Policies\Explorer. In the right side panel, click right to create a new DWORD value with the name MaxRecentDocs and then set values with your required input value. Reboot and voila!
If you want to disable this functionality then simply change the value of data box to 15 or delete the MaxRecentDocs DWORD item."
Windows XP keeps track of more than 15 lnk-files in the recent folder of a user and only shows 15 by default. The number of recent documents show in start menu can be changed. I think there is a registry key to that.
Edit Too slow 😉
By default, Windows displays only the last 15 documents. However, the Recent folder can contain hundreds of link files collected over months or years. Additionally, link files are likely to be in RAM and therefore are swapped out to the pagefile.sys file. So any adjustment to the size of the swap file from that point would place them in unallocated space. Of course, they would lose their directory pointers if the drive was subsequently formatted, but the data is still there unless overwritten. The Link File Parser EnScript recovers those links.
by default XP shows last 15 recent documents. Am I get You right, in this case You can see all two hundred of recent documents using that machine?