Our friendly Tech Support team can help you with one-to-one support, so you can make the most of your tech – free of frustration for just £6 per month (£5 for existing Which? members).

Your Recycle Bin is an area of your hard drive where you store ‘deleted’ files. As files can be recovered from the bin they still occupy your computer's hard disk space.

That's why it's worth emptying the Recycle Bin manually now and then. You can even make your computer work faster by emptying this bin regularly.

Empty your Recycle Bin

First, check that there's nothing in the bin that you want to keep. If you find any items that have been deleted incorrectly, you can right-click them then select restore.

To empty the rest of the Recycle Bin, double-click the icon on your desktop and from the menu that appears click Empty Recycle Bin.

Alternatively, from within the Recycle Bin itself, click the Empty the Recycle Bin button along the top menu.

A warning box will appear. Click Yes to permanently delete files.