$RECYCLE.BIN | The Coffeehouse

earnshaw
Jack Sleeps

I notice I have a system/hidden folder $RECYCLE.BIN on my C: drive. It consumes many bytes on my hard drive. Yet, the Recycle Bin is empty. Windows keeps a lot of hidden data around, especially cached web visits. I wonder how an ordinary user can easily reclaim the space. I know about the DISK CLEANUP button and I don't trust it.

JChung2006

You don't trust Disk Cleanup? Why not?

turrican
Condemnation without investigation is the height of ignorance! - Albert Einstein

I don't trust the disk clean up either. Sometimes, if you delete the desktop.ini in your recycle.bin, it will show a lot of folders inside it which you can just delete. ( or do a dir /a /s inside it ).

For cleaning up windows, I do the following :

Clean your temp folders, you got \windows\temp and also a folder inside user\<name>\*somewhere* or documents and settings\<user>\*somewhere* , check both of them, in time they can grow to several GBs! You can delete anything inside those without a problem.
Check your IE cache, it sets it way too high. Sometimes more than 1GB! I usually set it to 1MB.
\windows\<blue folders> , they are compressed folders for rollback of windows updates. You almost never need them. You can just delete them.
\windows\system32\dllcache ( sometimes doesn't show in explorer, you gott'a type it ), it contains backup of a whole windows installation, tausands of files, around 1GB or so. You can also delete contents of this folder without any problems.
Having 8GB RAM, I also set the swap file to ZERO.

All that said, the above is for "power users", not for average joe six pack. Although, I have done the above since windows 2000 on my machines, my customer's machines, my family's machines without ANY problem. Ever.

There is also :

Enjoy!

Dexter

In reply to turrican

#Jun 15th, 2008 @ 10:54 PM

$RECYCLE.BIN is Vista specific. If he is running Vista there will be no \Windows\<blue folders> from the updates or \windows\system32\dllcache.

@earnshaw: If you're really using Vista maybe it is another user account that has something in recycle bin? If not and your own recycle bin is empty then you can safely delete $RECYCLE.BIN dir, it will be recreated next time you delete something.

littleguru
<3 Seattle

In reply to turrican

#Jun 15th, 2008 @ 10:54 PM

Hmmm.. I find Disk Cleanup working very great in Vista. I haven't used it before Vista, but with Vista it seems to be improved. This is my own unproofable opinion but it cleans a lot of stuff and it never deleted stuff that I would have missed afterwards.

Also, it was awesome to delete all the old crap from the XP install that I had on my old notebook after the Vista upgrade.