I'm sure I remember this coming up before on this list, but I can't find it
in the archives. (Although the fact that the Yahoo Groups search engine
appears only to let you search about 2000 messages at a time tried my
patience somewhat.) I've also looked on Google, and can't find anything
useful.

My recycle bin is taking up more space than is useful - 300MB of my 30GB
disk. I had a dig around in there and found stuff I had deleted months ago.
Generally speaking this wouldn't worry me, but I finally got around to
finding out what was causing what I thought was a different problem on my
laptop, and it turns out to be related:

When I try to shut down, reboot, suspend, or hibernate my laptop, it sits
and thrashes, often for minutes, before giving me the "Turn Off Computer"
window. (I'm running Windows XP Pro, and I'm referring to the window that
pops up when you do Start Menu -> Turn Off Computer.)

I finally got around to running FileMon to see what it was doing. (And by
the way, I also just discovered that WinCVS polls a whole load of files on
your hard disk on an alarmingly regular basis, but that's a different
issue.) It turns out that the thing that was causing the thrashing pre
shutdown was that Windows was scanning my whole recycling bin before showing
me the window. I'm not quite sure why - I guess there are certain events
that cause it to go and check that the recycle bin isn't occupying more
space than it should, and shutdown is one of those.

The thing is, that due to some feature of the way I use my machine, my
recycle bin contained 4,300 folders. It takes a while to read that many
folders. So even though it obviously doesn't need to touch all 300MB of
stuff in the bin, it does need to go and read all 4,300 folders to find out
whether there's more than 300MB in the bin right now. Since I think a
folder takes up 4K on disk, this means it has to go and fetch about 17MB of
data off the disk just to check the recycle bin status.

Also, as you can imagine, deleting files is pretty slow...

So searching the internet, I get lots of helpful advice telling me to set my
recycle bin to 1%. I had already done that some time ago. I'd like to make
it smaller now please. I can't see how. The UI has a minimum size of 1%.
The place in the registry that the UI controls is this:

HKLM\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\BitBucket
Percent

where Percent is a REG_DWORD, currently set to 1. So the next smallest size
would appear to be zero... But I don't want to turn off the recycle bin
completely. I'd like it to store, say, the last 2 or 3 days of stuff.

So does anyone have a better solution than emptying it from time to time?
(That's not great because what I really want to say is "Please throw out
everything older than a few days".) And remember, this is not a lack of
disk space issue, it's a performance issue - it typically takes 45 seconds
between me trying to shut down, and getting the Turn Off Computer dialog.
(Unless I've just deleted something. In that case it takes 45 seconds to
delete, but at least the recycling bin directory structure in the cache, so
shutting down is now nice and fast.) And yes, I already have a 5400rpm hard
disk in my laptop...


--
Ian Griffiths
DevelopMentor