Reclaim Space by Emptying the Recycling Bin or Trash

Here’s a quick tip.

While some of us may think this is a very obvious tip others may not have any idea about the concept of the Recycle Bin (or simply “Trash” in Mac OS X) and the fact that stuff that’s in there still chews up hard drive space. Sure, these days with drive now reaching up to 3TB (that’s terabytes or thousands of gigabytes or millions of megabytes) you could be forgiven for being lazy and not emptying the Recycle Bin or Trash at all.

However, for those of us using solid state drives, netbooks or lower end laptops with smaller hard drives space can still be a precious commodity. Clearing out Recycle Bin or Trash will help free up some space to keep you going for the immediate future. Another benefit of enacting this bit of housekeeping is that you can be rid of files you no longer actually require prior to defragmenting your drive which should a better job at optimising the file system.

Anyway, emptying the Recycle Bin is very easy and can be done by right clicking on it and clicking on “Empty Recycle Bin”. On Mac OS X, you can either right click on Trash and click on “Empty Trash” or click on “Finder” then “Empty Trash”.

Tomorrow, I’ll show you how to change limit the size of the Recycle Bin in Windows.