Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional in 10 Minutes

Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional in 10 Minutes

By Dorothy Burke and Jane Calabria

Emptying the Recycle Bin

To keep your hard disk drive "lean and mean," you're going to have to empty the Recycle Bin from time to time, especially if you get an error message when you try to save a file saying that there is insufficient disk space.

Caution

Do You Have Enough Room? You should check your hard disk space occasionally to make sure you have enough room to add more files. If you don't have much space left on the drive, you should empty your recycle bin. To check your available disk space, open the My Computer window, click the hard drive icon to select it, and then check the amount of free space listed on the status bar.

Selected Files

You may not want to remove all the files from the Recycle Bin, especially if you think you might need some of them again.

To remove only specified files from the Recycle Bin:

  1. Select the files you want to delete (see Lesson 9, "Managing Files with My Computer," to learn how to select files).
  2. Press the Delete key, click the Delete button on the toolbar, or choose File, Delete from the menu.

Tip

What's in a File? Before you permanently delete a file from your hard drive, you may want to check its contents first. To open a file from the Recycle Bin, drag the icon to the desktop and then double-click it.

All Files

To remove all the files from the Recycle Bin, choose File, Empty Recycle Bin from the menu or click Empty Recycle Bin in the left pane of the window.

If you don't have the Recycle Bin window open, you can empty the Recycle Bin from the desktop by right-clicking the icon and selecting Empty Recycle Bin from the pop-up menu.

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