Quick access in Windows 10 with Direct Access

Quick access is a feature in Windows 10 which lets you quickly view recently opened documents and folders.  This is handy for users to gain access to files they access on a regular basis.

 

On the Avantgarde Technologies network all our employees use Direct Access to provide seamless connectivity back to resources in the office.  We found on links with poor bandwidth and high latency, Quick access causes performance issues and causes Windows Explorer to hang up to 10 seconds every time a user tries to save a file or open a new Explorer window.

 

To ensure employees which are outside the office are not affected with performance issues, we disabled this technology on all our Windows 10 workstations.  The two registry keys you want to modify are under this location:

 

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer

 

ShowFrequent

ShowRecent

 

Both are REG_DWORD values.

 

Simply modify both these registry keys to 0.

 

 

 Deploy these registry keys to all your users using Group Policy Preferences.

After making this change, Windows Explorer will be a lot more snappy for remote users connecting via Direct Access or another VPN technology.