Information Addicts

Whether you love or hate it, or just leave it to its own devices, the Recycle Bin is an integral part of windows, and depending on its settings, can take up a huge amount of hard drive space and slow down the performance of your computer.

At the end of the day, the Recycle Bin is just another windows folder, and most users leave it to its default settings. As you may well know, every time you delete a file or folder, it goes straight in to the Recycle Bin. This can be a handy tool if you accidentally delete a file or folder, as you can easily restore it by going in to the Recycle Bin and right clicking the file.

Leaving the recycle bin to its default settings can mean that a large chunk of your hard drive is filled with files that you will never use again.

So how do you use the Windows Recycle Bin to your advantage?

By following my tips below you can take advantage of the Recycle Bin, once and for all.

1. The first thing you should do with the Recycle Bin is change the size, so that it doesn’t take up a lot of your hard drive space. And, if you accidentally delete a file or folder, then you can breathe a sigh of relief, knowing that you can still restore it.
To do this, right click the Recycle Bin and choose Properties, click on the Global tab. If you have more than one drive or partition, I would recommend that you click on the radio button, ‘Use one setting for all drives’. Now drag the slider all the way to the left, until it displays between 1%-5%. 1% is enough if you don’t delete image files. Remember the larger the number, the more hard drive space you are using. Click OK.

2. If like many users, you never use the Recycle Bin, you can completely bypass it and save valuable hard drive space. To do this, right click the Recycle Bin and choose Properties, on the Global tab, click the radio button ‘Do not move files to the Recycle Bin. Remove files immediately when deleted’. Be aware that when you choose this option, and delete a file, you will not be able to retrieve it.

3. If you want the best of both worlds, (and who doesn’t) then you can choose option 1 above, but also if you have any files or folders you want to delete, and are 100% sure you will never use again, right click on the file or folder press shift and then click on Delete. You will receive a message box that asks ‘are you sure’… click Yes, and this will bypass the Recycle bin and you will never see it again.

Top image is by Peter Kaminski.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 8th, 2008 at 1:00 pm and is filed under PC Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.