The Recent Documents feature in Windows can come in handy if you need to find a file you've used in the last few hours. But Windows only shows you the last 15 documents you've used, doesn't sort them by file type, and doesn't let you search your history. ActualDoc is a utility that will do all of those things and more.

When the program is minimized to your system tray you can right click on its icon to bring up a menu that's basically a supercharged version of Recent Documents. You can see all of your most recently used files, just the Office, PDF, and TXT documents, multimedia files, or images.

You can also customize launch the main program window which shows all of the same files, but also gives information like file size and where they're located. ActualDoc also includes a document explorer which lets you view the contents of supported file types.

ActualDoc comes in two varieties, a standard edition which is free and a pro version which sells for 19.95 Euros, or about $30 US. The pro version comes with a graphics editor, and a viewer which can read Office and PDF documents as well as a file search utility.

Users can also password protect their history. But that's only useful if you disable the built-in Windows Recent Documents feature. Otherwise anyone who uses your computer can still access your history. You can find instructions for disabling Recent Documents in Windows after the jump.

[via Techie-Buzz]