Thursday, March 24, 2005

Changing the Size of the Recycle Bin

Did you know that by default, Windows allocates up to 10% percent of each hard drive for files thrown into the Recycle Bin. If you have a large hard drive that can be a lot of wasted space (ie: on a 100GB drive, that is 10GB of disk space).

With today's high capacity hard drive, you might want to consider setting this to a lower value like 1% percent (on a 100GB drive, that is 1GB of disk space). To change the size of the Recycle Bin:
  • Right-click the Recycle Bin, select Properties.
  • Move the slide bar until it read '1%' (or whatever else you like)
  • Press the OK button.
If you change this setting or not, you can always recover this disk space by emptying the trash can. Although, when your Recycle Bin is full, this can interfere with files be written to the disk if there is no space available. So by keeping it at a lower setting, this can help prevent this inconvenience from happening.

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