As in many walks of life you will find variations in philosophy especially in approaches to computer maintenance. Here at Panther Computers one of the steps we take is to turn off the recycle bin. Part of my philosophy is that (personally) I'm not going to delete something if I'm not sure I don't need it any more.

Too many people use the recycle bin as a holding tank till they are absolutely sure they want to delete it permanently. The problem with this is that most people that do this never empty the trash. This wastes valuable hard drive space and is a safe haven and even a bunker for viruses and spyware to hide.

The recycle bin is very susceptible to virus and spyware corruption making removal difficult and in some instances impossible. When getting ahead of a system laden with heavy virus and spyware infections, we often delete whole directories and file sets as quickly as possible after interrupting a virus spawn cycle.

This means that you can kill a process and delete it often before it re-spawns or launches again. If the recycle bin is on and being used at the time a virus restarts from within the bin, the bin can become corrupt to the point of being un-emptiable. The virus now has a permanent home to thwart the efforts of the technician to extract it.

The recycle bin is a special system folder that has special protections not unlike the system restore folder (_restore). So like the system restore, we turn off the recycle bin to protect you. You can always create your own folder to temporarily hold the "I think I want to delete it, but am not sure yet" files. Otherwise, at your own risk, right click the recycle bin on your desktop, and un-check the turn off recycle bin.