Windows.XP.in.a.Nutshell.1002005.2Ed [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

In

the early days of computing, once you
deleted a file, it was gone. An
unerase tool (available as part of Norton Utilities) was commonly
used to recover accidentally deleted files, and can even be used in
Windows XP to recover items emptied from the Recycle Bin. Thus, the
Recycle Bin was implementeda feature that gives nearly every
file a second chance, so to speak.

Drag any item from the Desktop to the Recycle
Bin icon to

delete
it, as shown in Figure 3-21.
File
Delete on the menubar of
a folder also moves items to the Recycle Bin, as does selecting the
item and then pressing the Delete key. By default, files are not
deleted immediately, but are stored until the Recycle Bin runs out of
space, at which point they are deleted, oldest first, to make space.
Until that time, they can be retrieved by double-clicking on the
Recycle Bin icon, browsing through the contents of the Recycle Bin
window, and dragging or sending the file elsewhere.

Figure 3-23. Drag nearly any icon onto your Recycle Bin to delete it; subsequently open the Recycle Bin folder to retrieve it

Use the Delete key to move any selected files to the
Recycle Bin. To access the Recycle Bin with the keyboard,
it's easiest to simply open
Windows Explorer and navigate to
your \Recycled folder (there's
one on each drive, if you have more than one).

Files dragged to the Recycle Bin (or that are otherwise deleted) from floppies, network drives, or other external drives such as Zip drives will not be stored in the Recycle Bin. They are simply deleted.

The following settings are available in the
Recycle Bin's
Properties window:

• A slider allows you to specify how
  much of each drive can be allocated to the Recycle Bin. The default
  is 10 percent. You can specify the same value for all drives or set a
  separate value for each drive. Keep in mind that on
  today's huge drives, 10 percent can be a lot: 10
  percent of a 40 gigabyte disk is 4 full gigabytes of stored junk. The
  amount of space actually used by the files in the Recycle Bin is
  displayed in the Bin's status bar when you open it.

• A checkbox allows you to specify
  that deleted files are not to be stored in the Recycle Bin, but
  removed immediately from the disk. Check this box if you
  don't want to have to remember to empty your Recycle
  Bin to delete files, although it can be rather dangerous if
  you're careless with the Del key.

• A checkbox asks if you want to display a
  delete confirmation dialog. Unlike some
  earlier versions of Windows, it's possible to have
  the delete confirmation turned off at the same time that the
  "Do not move files to the Recycle
  Bin" setting is turned on. This means that
  it's possible to permanently delete files without
  any warnings at all.

  To delete a single file without sending it to the Recycle Bin, use Shift-Delete or the del command at the command prompt.

Notes

• With the Details view (the default), you can sort
  the contents of the Recycle Bin by name, by original location (useful
  in case you want to put something back where it was), by the date
  deleted, by type, or by size. Click on any of the headings to sort
  contents by that heading. Click again on the same heading to reverse
  the order of the sort.

• You can delete the entire contents of a floppy
  disk by dragging the disk icon to the
  Recycle Bin. You will be prompted for confirmation. You cannot drag a
  hard disk (such as C:) to the Recycle Bin,
  however, nor can you drag key components of the user interface, such
  as the My Computer, the Control Panel, or My Network Places to the
  Recycle Bin. (Well, you can drag them there, but they
  won't go in.) Note that some of these Desktop items
  can be removed by right-clicking and selecting Delete. See Chapter 5 for more ways to control what appears on
  your Desktop.