Good and bad news. The good news is that I can tell you how to do it for MS Word etc., the bad news is that I can’t for media player (which is what you really wanted, I suspect).
It’s usually handled through the “Options” menu within the application. So in Word’s case, you go to Tools/Options/General and click on the “Recently used file list” checkbox.
All applications store their own lists of opened files, usually in the registry, sometimes in a file. Most do not expose any method of clearing the list. In Media Player 6, it is in the registry under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\Player\RecentURLList. Newer versions may not use the same key, I don’t know. You can just remove the offending values from that key. If you don’t know what that means, you probably should not edit the registry.
Most (actually, all of them) of the programs I use have less than 10 files stored in the drop-menu. If you simply delete the files, the drop-menu of course refuses to load them. Are the files named something like “fuckmehard.jpg”?
If so, then I suggest doing the “low-tech” solution and load more “innocent” files, and remember in the future to rename embarrassing files.
The only way I’ve discovered is manually drag 10 or so mp3s into Media Player and overwrite the existing entries.
MagicalSilverKey:
This can be done much more efficiently. Simply right-click the taskbar and select ‘Properties’.
Or, even easier, just hit Start Key + U (ie, trigger the Shutdown dialogue), but rather than turning your computer off, hit Esc or click ‘cancel’. If you run Microsoft’s TweakUI facility (which I can highly recommend), this will clear all manner of embarassing entries (including your documents list) just as if you had in fact restarted your computer.
Uh…I would never suggest adding a program to your computer simply to delete something. Win98 takes up enough space as is, w/o adding more to it. Since your first suggestion told what to do, why should someone add a new program to do the same thing? That’s why Windows is a bloated as it is now…people think they need the “latest and greatest” to do the same thing an old program did.
And I would suggest knowing what TweakUI does before denouncing it It does quite a bit more than just delete things. Another plus is for low tech people who don’t know how to do much (say opening up msconfig to stop butts loads of stuff from starting up with your computer) it’s easily accessable and is easy to understand. It lets you customize the settings a bit more which comes in handy.
I wasn’t denouncing it. I happen to know it does quite a bit (but nothing that I need). I was just stating that one should not tell someone else to add a program just to do something a bit easier than a program already on their machine. That’s what adds to bloat.
The OP asked how to remove the list of recently accessed files under MediaPlayer. I recommended TweakUI not to achieve this specific purpose, but for purposes in a similar vein: if the OPer wants to remove file entries under MediaPlayer, my intuition tells me he or she may wish to remove similarly revealing information in other Win98 programs. The TweakUI utility is one way of doing so; this was the reason for my suggestion, it was not recommended “simply to delete something”.
Bloated as Windows may be, TweakUI is not. It is a tiny download.
It doesn’t matter how small a d/l it is, nor does it matter how small the program is when it runs. The fact is it is an extra program, adding to the Windows bloat. Why should someone add a new program to their computer that does the same thing they already can do with an existing program? People that recommend programs that do the same thing that existing programs do, only slighty better, and adding to existing programs, are not solviing problems.
I have an “enhanced” 133 MHz 486, with 32 MB memory, and only 7 GB HD space; and can run any equivilant program a 1GHz P4 runs (except many games, and professional scientific programs, of course).
If you’re worried about bloat, you really shouldn’t be running Windows. Install Linux or get a Mac. Bloat is the name of the game in Microsoft Land.
And TweakUI is pretty much part of the feature set of Windows 98 (first edition)–it’s even included on the disk.
As for why one would “add a new program to their computer that does the same thing they already can do with an existing program,” well, that’s something of a silly question. Why buy a word processing program? Notepad does roughly the same thing. Why buy games? Windows comes with solitaire. Photoshop? Microsoft Paint draws pictures, too! :rolleyes:
It does quite a bit more than just delete things. Another plus is for low tech people who don’t know how to do much (say opening up msconfig to stop butts loads of stuff from starting up with your computer) it’s easily accessable and is easy to understand. It lets you customize the settings a bit more which comes in handy.