Empty Your Recycle Bin

Just a quick suggestion.

Empty your recycle bin!

I can't count the number of times I sit down at a person's PC and notice they have never or very infrequently emptied the recycle bin. This thing can account for some loss of Hard Drive space, and if it's never been emptied it can add up quickly.

So find that old Recycle Bin on your computer's desktop, right click it, and select "empty Recycle Bin". I recommend doing this AT LEAST once a week, preferably more. If you're feeling really ambitious you can turn it off completely and have all of your deleted files instantly fly into nothingness.

We all make mistakes sometimes though so I don't actually recommend doing this procedure.

If you're still feeling like a daredevil, right click the recycle bin and select "Properties". You'll get a menu like this.


Check the box there that says "Do not move files to the Recycle bin...". If you're limited on hard drive space you can also move the slider to shrink the available size of your recycle bin. Keep in mind this will cause some larger files to delete instead of being recycled. If your recycle bin has 5% of a 50 gig drive, anything over 2.5 gigs will automatically go straight to delete land. No easy recovery possible.

You can also select the check box to configure the drives independently. Maybe you never want to recycle files when deleting from your C drive but you have a 500 gigabyte D drive that you want to devote 50% of it's capacity to recycled files (why is beyond me but hey, whatever gets you going).

Now, let's say you've accidentally delete a file and it's gone to your recycle bin. This is your safety net, this is why the thing exists! Maybe in a fit of rage you went and deleted all of the poetry you wrote to your ex girlfriend but now you've decided you may want to reuse those clever bits for your next gal. Assuming you haven't emptied it, right click the recycle bin and select "Explore".

A windows should pop up showing all of the files in the recycle bin. Now, right click and select "Restore" on the files you want to keep.



They will return to their original location, unscathed. Note: If you've deleted an entire folder you'll need to restore the entire folder even if you simply want individual files.

On the off chance that you've deleted something critical you'll need to break out some more complex file recovery software (I have had good luck with R-Studio). that is however a more complex topic for another day.