If you have a small hard drive like an SSD, then reducing the size of the recycle bin can save you quite a bit of space. Secondly, you can right-click on the recycle bin, choose Properties and configure a couple of options like the size of the recycle bin and whether or not you want to see the delete confirmation dialog. You should only use this option when you are completely certain you won’t need to recover a file later on. There’s not much else to getting the recycle bin back, but there are a couple of tricks I’ve learned over time.įirstly, you can bypass the recycle bin by simply holding down the CTRL key when you delete a file in Windows. This will bring up the exact same dialog as in Windows 7. The Charms bar will appear on the right with the search results. On Windows 8, you click on the pseudo Start button and start just typing desktop icons. This will bring up the same dialog similar to the one in Windows Vista where you can just check Recycle Bin to bring it back to your desktop. Go ahead and click Show or hide common icons on the desktop. First, click on Start and then type in desktop icons. In Windows 7, the process is slightly different for recovering your recycle bin icon. The Recycle Bin icon should now be on your desktop and should automatically update based on whether there is data in the trash or not. Do the same thing with the empty Recycle Bin icon and go ahead and click Apply. Select the already highlighted icon, which should be the full Recycle Bin icon. Then go ahead and left click on the Recycle Bin full icon and click Change Icon. If you have this problem where the recycle bin icon does not change to reflect “full” and “empty” then you need to first check off Recycle Bin icon like shown above. It’s almost like Windows Vista gets confused and simply uses one icon instead of switching back and forth. However, there may be an issue for some people in which the Recycle Bin continually shows full or empty and does not change depending on if something is added or removed from the trash. If you click Apply, your icon should now be back on the desktop.

Recycle bin on windows 8