Windows 10 File Explorer Tweaks

If you're anything like me, you may like having things just so. I'm putting the finishing touches to a brand new AD domain (for personal use) and was creating the GPO for all of my commonly-used settings.

Part of those settings involved getting File Explorer tweaked to match all of the common preferences I like to use. Some of those involve Quick Access; namely, turning off the two options highlighted below: Show recently used files in Quick access and Show frequently used folders in Quick access. I go through an extraordinary number of files and folders on any given day (this is a development computer) and these two settings tend to clutter up things.

These can be easily turned off manually, but I was trying to get them turned off via a GPO so that it would apply to all my Windows 10 computer simultaneously. A preliminary search failed to turn up anything of interest, so I took to ProcMon, a tool from SysInternals, and had it watch the registry for any changes while I made the adjustment.

After some sifting through the logs, I finally found both registry paths. I've listed them below. I hope that this helps out someone else who may want to GPO these items.

Show recently used files in Quick access

1. Open the Registry Editor
2. Navigate to HKCU\Software\Microsoft\CurrentVersion\Explorer
3. Create a REG_DWORD value called ShowRecent
4. Set the value to 0 to uncheck the option and 1 to check the option

Show frequently used folders in Quick access

1. Open the Registry Editor
2. Navigate to HKCU\Software\Microsoft\CurrentVersion\Explorer
3. Create a REG_DWORD value called ShowFrequent
4. Set the value to 0 to uncheck the option and 1 to check the option