Multiple recycle bins

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PIII 450 mhz, WIN 98SE, 384mb

Hello all,

My machine has two physical hardrives. The first is c:, the second has a primary dos d:, and one logical drive in an extended partition e: I’m not running multiple OS’s. Recently I added a TDK Velocd RW drive and associated software and now I have a recycle bin on each drive. I am assuming this happened due to the hardware/software install.

They all seem to be the same, they have the same contents, deleting from one deletes from all, they all have a tab on the recycle bin property sheet. I cant delete the bin itself (folder) from d: or e:

My questions are- are there really three instances of the recycle bin, or three representations of one instance? Can/should I do anything about it, or chalk it up to annoyances?

The MS KB has this article- KB 249882 which may apply, but doesn’t suggest making any change.

Thanks for any help, Dave

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Is your recycle bin set to use ‘One setting for all drives’ or are they set independently?

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To expound on Leif’s question a bit, if you haven’t changed the settings for the Recycle Bin, it will show across multiple dirves, as it uses (by default) 10% of the space on each partition and drive visible to Windows. That is also why the contents appear to be the same – they are.

There is only one Recycle Bin sharing space on all of your drives. Should you do anything about it? My opinion is that 10% of all partitions and hard drives is a pretty fair amount of space – I like to set the space on each drive individually, and I have found that around 200MB total is plenty. I set the value for C: to 0%, so no space where Windows is installed is used.

I never really looked to see if the icon disappears from a drive when you set it to 0% – so if it doesn’t, there’s a tic in the ‘annoyances’ column!

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Leif and Mark

Thanks for the quick response. Interesting that I didn’t notice the icons on the second and third drives until I did the hardware/software install. Anyway, I did have the recycle bin set globally, already reduced from the default 10%, but I took your advice and set it locally for each drive, reducing it’s size further (still about 400mb) and removing it (0%) from c:

Dave

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FWIW

After applying the settings in the previous message (ie-local settings, C: set to 0%, D: and E: to 1%) and restarting, the recycle icon still showed in the C: tree, but anything deleted from the C: drive became permanently deleted, D: and E: still used the recycle bin. Not what I initially expected, but I guess this makes sense.

I reset C: to 1% use because I still want the function on all drives. At this point does it matter whether I use individual or global settings at 1%? Just curious.

Thanks, Dave

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Individually, the percentage that you assign per drive is the space that will be used, on that particular drive. 1% globally will add the space of all drives together, determine 1%, and then split that across all drives.

Should you set them individually? Depends on how much space you want to sacrifice – I am a control freak and prefer to tell the operating system what it can and cannot do, particulary when it comes to these sort of things (i.e. using up my disk). Whatever you are comfortable with is the best setting.

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