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Recycle Bin
I suppose the best way to think of the
Recycle Bin is a safety net between the user and deletion
disaster. I've been using computers for years and so far,
knock on wood, I've yet to delete a file that I needed to go
back and recover but tomorrow may be the day it happens. As
long as the Recycle Bin is operational there is at least a
chance of recovering the data if necessary.
The Default Settings
When a clean installation of XP is
performed the Recycle Bin will be the lone icon installed on
the desktop. It's fully operational and ready for use with
the default settings as shown in the screen captures below.
To view the settings, right click the Recycle Bin icon and
select Properties.
The Global tab applies to all drives on
the system. By default XP uses one setting for all the
drives, allocates 10% of the space on each drive for the
Recycle Bin, and displays a confirmation dialog box whenever
a file is deleted. As you can see below, if one setting is
being used for all drives then all the information on the
Local Disk tab is grayed out. Personally, I find the default
amount of allocated disk space to be excessive and cut it
way back but you should tailor it to your personal needs
based on file sizes you normally delete. Also, the
confirmation dialog is a supreme nuisance. Most of the time
I turn off Recycle Bin completely, but even if I do leave it
on I always turn off the confirmation dialog.

Confirm File Delete
I had a little problem when putting
together this section. It's probably a case of my memory
being faulty, but when I was doing some quick testing I
created a file on the desktop and then used left click/drag
and drop to place it in the Recycle Bin. I was expecting to
see the Confirm File Delete dialog shown below but it didn't
appear. OK, so then I tried right click/drag and drop. Same
result; no confirmation. Then I went into Windows Explorer
and tried the same procedures. Still no confirmation dialog.
Thoroughly confused by now, I stayed in
Windows Explorer and made sure the files to be deleted were
visible in the right pane. First I highlighted the file and
then pressed the Delete key on the keyboard. The Confirm
File Delete dialog box appeared. Deciding to press my luck I
right clicked a file to be deleted and selected Delete from
the context menu. Again the Confirm File Delete dialog box
appeared.
So, maybe it's just me, but I could swear
that the default behavior was to always show the Confirm
File Delete dialog box. I've since retested on a few
different systems and the results have been the same as what
I outlined above. I'm sure I'll get plenty of feedback on
this to let me know if I'm crazy or not, but test your own
machine and see how the Confirm File Delete dialog box
functions.

Inside the Recycle Bin
Open the Recycle Bin using a double
click. All the files that have been selected for deletion
will be waiting inside. There are quite a few different ways
to display files inside a folder and Recycle Bin is no
exception. The two screen captures below show Heirarchial
and Task views of the same Recycle Bin. It would be easy to
spend an hour going over all the different ways to handle
files in the Recycle Bin, but here are the basics.

Once a file is in the Recycle Bin there
are essentially two operations of interest; either restore
the file to its original location or delete it from the
Recycle Bin and it's gone forever.
If Heirarchial View is being used, either
use the File Menu or the right click context menu on an
individual or group of files to either Restore the file(s)
to their previous location or to Delete them from the
Recycle Bin. Restoring the files places them back where they
were located before being sent to the Recycle Bin. Deleting
the files from the Recycle Bin ends their lifespan on the
system without any option to bring them back again.
If Task View is being used the same
options in Heirarchial View are available and the Task views
on the left of the window can be used. The operation
descriptions in Task View will change depending on whether
you have selected a single or multiple files.

Empty the Recycle Bin versus Delete
It's worth taking a minute to discuss the difference between
Delete and Empty the Recycle Bin commands. Use Delete to
selectively remove a single file or group of files from the
Recycle Bin. The Empty the Recycle Bin command does just
that; it automatically selects all the files contained in
the bin and deletes them from the system.

This is the Confirm Multiple File Delete dialog that would
appear if the two highlighted files were removed using the
Delete command.

This is the Confirm Multiple File Delete dialog that would
appear if the Empty the Recycle Bin command was selected.
Notice that it makes no difference that the two files were
already selected. All four files in the Recycle Bin will be
deleted.

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