Optimize Your Recycle Bin For Faster Delete Times

The Windows Recycle Bin is where your files go to die. If you inadvertently delete a file, you can easily restore it from the Recycle Bin. However, a poorly configured recycle bin can slow down your system performance.

When you delete a file, it is moved to the Recycle Bin. If the Recycle Bin is mis-configured, it will take upwards of a minute to delete a file. This generally happens on if you have a large disk and the Recycle Bin is using the default settings.

The default settings for the Recycle Bin reserves 10 percent of your disk space for deleted files. When Windows XP first was released typical disk sizes were under 30GB. Ten percent of this is 300MB, a size big enough to hold most deleted files. Now, with disk sizes approaching a terabyte, you could end up having a 100GB Recycle Bin space. This is a problem because as the Recycle Bin approaches full, Windows has to start getting rid of older files. The algorithm they use to do this is not very efficient and it can take minutes to delete a single file.

You can adjust the default Recycle Bin size and improve the performance of file deletes by doing the following steps:

1. Right click on the Recycle Bin and choose Properties
2. On the Recycle Bin properties, move the Recycle Bin size slider from 10 percent to 3 or even 1 percent.

Remember, this is still a decent amount of storage since you now have a larger disk to work with.

3. Click OK

Empty your current Recycle Bin and you should now see your file delete time improve.

Joe Cotellese is the editor of Faster Windows, a computer resource dedicated to helping beginner Windows users get the best performance from their system.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Joe_Cotellese

By Joe Cotellese