Recently, I’ve been working on an enormous Web site, so I copied vast numbers of graphics and files to my hard disk. I had to slog through countless folders to figure out what I was going to keep and what I was going to dump. Little did I know the impact this seemingly innocuous activity would have on my computing experience.
After a while, as I was working away, I noticed that deleting files was taking a long time. Normally, when you delete a 2KB html file, it blips out of existence instantly. You don’t think much about it. But now, deleting that same little file was taking a lot longer, like 15 – 30 seconds.
Okay, 30 seconds doesn’t sound like a long time, but when Windows Explorer has essentially locked up your computer, it feels like an eternity. I started thinking that maybe my virus checker had let me down. Or that some horrible spyware thing had made it through my firewall. I was pondering endless cleanup activities and worrying about my data. Maybe it was my hard disk’s way of telling me it’s tired. Uh oh.
Anyway, it turned out that all my doom and gloom thoughts were for nothing. All the megabytes upon megabytes of files I’d been deleting had been filling up my Recycle Bin. As the bin filled, the computer slowed.
The short answer was to empty my Recycle Bin. To empty it, you just right-click the icon and choose Empty Recycle Bin from the pop-up menu.
The Recycle Bin is set to use a certain percentage of your hard disk. By default, the maximum size is set to 10%. Well, if you have a 40 or 60-gigabyte drive, your Recycle Bin actually can end up being filled with many, many megabytes of data. No wonder it bogs down. The Recycle Bin has to permanently delete some old file to send your new file to the bin.
After you empty the bin, it doesn’t have to go through this process, so deleting happens instantaneously again. The bottom line is that, for good performance, you should empty your Recycle Bin frequently.