The Recycle Bin

[JSixpack]

See below

Edited April 16, 2006 by JSixpack

[JSixpack]

Dear JSixpack, where are your technical explanations upon how to solve these problems?

In post #17 I gave the OP three easy non-intrusive tech solutions to the particular problem he posed.

The fact that you missed these solutions underscores my suspicion that you have some sort of reading impairment or perhaps are in need of a new eyeglass prescription.

[in] the "Computer Has Slowed Down" post . . . you do nothing but argue against my ideas without much technical explanation whatsoever.

It’s no part of my purpose here to educate you free of charge. (We can discuss hourly rates if you wish.) I don’t really care what you may wrongly believe. If a member of the Flat Earth Society tells me the world is flat, I’ll similarly give him a link to Britannica or Wikipedia for a history of the subject if he’s interested. It was, I think, kind of me to bother to refer you to authoritative sites where you may start to gain some perspective. You see, the burden of proof is on you to show that your ideas have any merit, because you are the one calling for changing the default. In the end, your “reasons” all boiled down to mere assertions that viruses confine themselves to C: partitions, and that partitioning per se reduces file fragmentation; the first is absurd and the second effectively inapplicable to NTFS for average users. Your rather childish reasoning on the basis of an anecdotal evidence committed a classic error in logic: that of mistaking correlation for causation.

In this instance, you resort to using other websites ,which I proved to be flawed.

Oh, not only did you not prove anything of the sort but you even misread what you tried to read. You’re just always thinking you’ve proved something you haven’t, aren’t you? Perhaps this may account for some of your smugness.

And again, in this post, you fail to provide any technical retort to my idea.

I know this may come as a shock, but, believe it or not, your “idea” isn’t the topic of this thread! So far you’ve merely huffed and puffed here about revealing your idea by special dispensation. And when you finally do, I predict it will be pretty much off-topic anyway, a solution in search of a problem--and certainly overkill, which as you know is something the yanks do.

. . .please provide some 'real advice' of 'your own.'

Again, in post #17 in this thread I gave three three quite specific, easy, fast technical solutions to the OP’s query. You will likely find that post if you manage to read 'top left to bottom right' of your browser window as you scroll through the thread.

Maybe you would be better off providing REAL support instead of wasting your time trying to belittle me.

Having alread given the REAL support, I extended my support for this OP in this thread by helping to clear your smoke out of the way and so improve the signal-to-noise ratio so that he may make an informed decision. As quite rightly noted by sting01 in post #24, ”Where have you give a concrete, real, technically understandable solution?”

. . . . . . . . .

OK, so (yawn) you finally came out with it post #25 and as predicted it had nothing much at all to do specifically with the OP’s query. It was not sting01’s “concrete, real, technically understandable solution.“ In fact, the words “recycle bin” were nowhere even mentioned in your post. Reading between the lines, one may infer that you agree with the solution already proposed that the emptying of the OP’s recycle bin should not be automated. You added nothing new of value to that solution. However, I’ve shown in post #17 how the OP can easily have the convenience of automation AND recovery of anything later deemed worth keeping.

As for the rest of your post, we can all certainly agree that computer users should acquire some knowledge of file extensions and of how to create folders and to organize files into folders, as long as it isn’t taught to them by IT Experts. People should diet and exercise more, too.

Now, if a user knows how to create, say, the folder “My Novel” within his “My Documents” and then save Chapter1.doc etc. there, then it’s all to the better, as he may then easily find and open any of his chapters from the Start | My Documents menu. But to save his document over in some non-standard E:\Documents and then make him ever thereafter to have to open My Computer then drop down to E: then scroll down to Documents--and do the same whenever he wants to save a document—it would be better if the user never knew anything about creating folders than to have to suffer such completely unnecessary inconvenience. Poor user!

I would even (sigh) agree that having extra partitions made some sense back in the old Win98 days. Then programs didn’t depend so much on the registry: you could freshly reinstall Windows and most of ‘em would work OK. You could reinstall an image of the OS and drivers in 10 minutes and you were done. With WinXP, you have got not only to install the OS but also SP2 and all the updates, the drivers, the programs, and the user accounts, not to consider the favorites and the desktops for those accounts. Hence the advent of XP led to a proliferation of drive imaging solutions. (Dear elkangorito, I know that you aren’t clear on the distinctions between, and uses for, mirroring, cloning, and imaging, but you just don’t appreciate my pointing you to external sources of IT information!)

However--though it of course has nothing at all to do with the OP’s recycle bin, except possibly to add the confusion and extra work of multiple bins--on modern WinXP NTFS systems the desirability of having extra partitions on one’s main hard drive has all but disappeared except for a special use or so. One of those uses, if one has only one hard drive, is to hold an image of the main partition; computer OEMs sometimes do this for disaster recovery purposes.

Another use, I’ve discovered recently thanks to you, elkangorito, is to protect one’s data, if one doesn’t regularly back it up, from computer techs who have such poor IT troubleshooting skills that, to solve a problem, they can only reformat one’s hard drive and freshly install the OS. Perhaps, after all, they may not even know how to get in and backup the data on an unbootable system before the reformatting. (One quite commonly encounters such techs in Thailand, BTW.)

For the latter case, “File Management” might better be termed “Techie Management.” Predictably, a techie who relies heavily on reformat and fresh install would find “Techie Management” convenient and self-serving.

Remarkably, it turns out fresh install with reformat seems to be the elkangorito typical fixit modus operandi:

(The quotes below are from previous discussion here. )

“If the system is rendered partly or totally inaccessible due to [virus] invasion, then formatting the drive & re-installing the OS is the ONLY [caps & boldface added] solution.”

“with every single client (100%) of my'n who has suffered a virus attack (& failed to back-up there data), I was able to format the 'C' drive & re-install the OS without any detrimental affect whatsoever to their data, which was SAFE on 'E' drive.”

Incredibly, elkangorito has reformatted and reinstalled his sister’s computer no less than five times:

“On the 5th occasion [of reformat and reinstall], I told her that I would refuse to do this again for her unless she allowed me to set up multi partitions & stop using Outlook Express.”

One can only speculate that such a vested interest in multipartioning—the better to enable fresh Windows installation as a means of troubleshooting--is responsible for such misleading half-truths as this: “If one insists upon using 1 logical drive & therefore the cluster sizes will be larger, the amount of wasted space increases (slack) dramatically increases & fragmentation will be very apparent.” (We're using NTFS these days.)

Of reinstallation as a means of troubleshooting, MS-MVP Chris Quirke quite rightly says here,

"Just re-installing Windows" breaks several cardinal troubleshooting rules, i.e.:

Know the scope of what you do

Maintain the ability to undo what you do

Test prospective fixes one at a time

Find the cause and mechanism of the problem

Determine the smallest-impact fix for the problem

Techs that "just re-install Windows" rather than troubleshoot are missing out on valuable learning and skill-building opportunities, as well as offering the client poor value. As a general rule for stand-alone PCs, the faster technicians resort to "just re-install" or "format and re-install", the more useless they are. "

Which I totally agree with. Me, I almost never reformat and fresh install as a means of computer repair, however unbootable the system may seem. I merely boot off a boot disk or whatever, kill the nasty, if there is one--or troubleshoot the hardware--and then clean and tune the present installation as needed.

After I fix a computer I do schedule a number of tools to run automatically and as transparently as possible at various times to prevent future problems and to make any future repairs even faster and easier. You see, average users can’t be depended on to do things manually. They have no interest in doing so, they don’t have time, they forget, they postpone.

No doubt this is why the OP has a program to automatically empty his recycle bin. Heck, I do the same, but I schedule it for once a week. Just one less thing to worry about.