You can, however, pin an item to a program’s jump list so it doesn’t disappear. It’s out of Windows’s clutches, at least until you unpin it. Figure 1-16 shows the technique.
Jump List Caveats Jump lists are great and all, but you should be aware of a few things: •• They don’t know when you’ve deleted a document or moved it to another folder or disk; they continue to list the file even after it’s gone. In that event, clicking the document’s listing produces only an error message. And you’re offered the chance to delete the listing (referred to as “this shortcut” in the error message) so you don’t confuse yourself again the next time. •• Some people consider jump lists a privacy risk, since they reveal everything you’ve been up to recently to whatever spouse or buddy happens to wander by. (You know who you are.) In that case, you can turn off jump lists, or just the incriminating items, as described next. Tip: Of course, even if you turn off jump lists, there’s another easy way to open a document you’ve recently worked on—from within the program you used to create it. Many programs maintain a list of recent documents in the File menu.
Jump List Settings There are all kinds of ways to whip jump lists into submission. For example: •• Turn off jump lists. If the whole idea of Windows (or your boss) tracking what you’ve been working on upsets you, you can turn this feature off entirely. To do that, right-click the Start menu. From the shortcut menu, choose Properties. Turn off “Store and display recently opened items in the Start menu and taskbar” and click OK. •• Delete one item from a jump list. For privacy, for security, or out of utter embarrassment, you may not want some file or Web site’s name to show up in a jump list. Just right-click and, from the shortcut menu, choose “Remove from this list.” •• Clear a jump list completely. At other times, you may want to wipe out all your jump lists—and all your tracks. To do that, right-click the Start menu. From the shortcut menu, choose Properties. Turn off the checkbox that says “Store and display recently opened items in the Start menu and taskbar” (that’s the master on/off switch for jump lists). Click Apply; you’ve just erased all the jump lists. If you didn’t intend to turn off jump lists for good, though, turn the “Store and display” checkbox back on again before clicking OK. Your jump lists are now ready to start memorizing new items. •• Change the number of documents in the list. Ordinarily, jump lists track the 10 most recent (or most frequently used) items, but you can goose that number up