Recycling Bin

By default, Windows reserves about 10 percent of each hard drive to store deleted files in the recycling bin. This is a bit excessive. Actually it's a lot excessive, unless you want to delete files a gigabyte in size or more that you send to the recycle bin that you want to later restore. Fortunately, there is an easy way to reduce the amount of hard disk space that is reserved for the recycling bins on each drive.

IN WINDOWS XP
Right click on the recycling bin and select 'Properties.'

Choose the Global tab.

The slider shows the percentage of each drive that is reserved by the recycling bin. Reduce this to a more appropriate amount, like from 1 to 3%,  or more if you like depending on the size of your drives. The larger the drives, the smaller the number you should use. If you wish to configure each drive independently, check the 'configure drives independently' button and adjust the slider to the desired amount in each of your hard disk's tabs. The advantage to doing things this way instead of using the 'global' setting is that you can see the actual amount of space on each drive that is being reserved.

When you are finished adjusting the settings, click 'Apply' and then 'Ok' to close the properties box.

Note that files larger than the recycling bin's capacity on a given drive are deleted for good. Windows will warn you when this condition occurs.

IN WINDOWS VISTA
Right click on the recycle bin icon on your desktop and click 'Properties'.

Now click on the Global settings' button at the bottom if present.

Select the 'custom size' option and enter in a more reasonable size value.  It's suggested to enter a maximum of 1 to 2 GB; There are 1024 Megabytes (MB) in one Gigabyte (GB). Click 'Apply' and then 'Ok' when you are finished.