Thursday, September 28, 2006
The Recycle Bin is a flexible place, willing to enlarge itself, as necessary, to accept your recently deleted files. By default, the space allocated by Windows for the Recycle Bin is up to 10 percent of your hard-drive space. If you think about it, that's a ton of space.
The Recycle Bin is constructed so that it keeps whatever ends up there until you manually delete it (or until the allocated disk space fills up). If the disk space fills up, then the oldest files in the Recycle Bin are deleted to make way for the newer items. If you have 8 GB (or more) set aside for the Recycle Bin, the sheer size of the allocated area means you're wasting a lot of disk space.
The solution is to change the amount of disk space allocated to the Recycle Bin:
Right-click the Recycle Bin icon and choose Properties. Windows displays the Properties dialog box for the Recycle Bin. The dialog box contains a tab named Global and one tab for each system drive.
On the Global tab, select the Use One Setting for All Drives option. You can configure your drives independently, but most people have no need to.
Use the slider to specify a smaller percentage of your hard drive for Recycle Bin space. If you have a large drive or several large drives, consider setting the slider as low as one percent. (Remember that one percent of 80GB is 800MB. That's still a large block of disk space for the Recycle Bin.)
Click OK.
How does resizing the Recycle Bin help unclutter your system? Simple: When Windows doesn't need to track as many deleted files, the operating system is more responsive.
The Recycle Bin is constructed so that it keeps whatever ends up there until you manually delete it (or until the allocated disk space fills up). If the disk space fills up, then the oldest files in the Recycle Bin are deleted to make way for the newer items. If you have 8 GB (or more) set aside for the Recycle Bin, the sheer size of the allocated area means you're wasting a lot of disk space.
The solution is to change the amount of disk space allocated to the Recycle Bin:
Right-click the Recycle Bin icon and choose Properties. Windows displays the Properties dialog box for the Recycle Bin. The dialog box contains a tab named Global and one tab for each system drive.
On the Global tab, select the Use One Setting for All Drives option. You can configure your drives independently, but most people have no need to.
Use the slider to specify a smaller percentage of your hard drive for Recycle Bin space. If you have a large drive or several large drives, consider setting the slider as low as one percent. (Remember that one percent of 80GB is 800MB. That's still a large block of disk space for the Recycle Bin.)
Click OK.
How does resizing the Recycle Bin help unclutter your system? Simple: When Windows doesn't need to track as many deleted files, the operating system is more responsive.
Sunday, September 24, 2006
Hackers come in all kinds, and it is difficult to classify them. However, over the years, a distinction has developed that tries to separate the "good hackers" from the "bad hackers." Hackers with benign intentions are referred to as the white hats, and hackers with sinister intentions are referred to as the black hats -- evoking images of the Mad magazine Spy vs. Spy comic strip. The black hats are what we commonly think of when we refer to hackers. These are the people who break into other people's computers, either to access data illegitimately or to joyride. The white hats, on the other hand, are the ones who study security vulnerabilities in order to learn how to protect computer systems. These white-hat hackers may be security professionals at corporations and government agencies who stay up-to-date on security vulnerabilities. White hats study hacking techniques to keep hackers out of computer systems. While most white-hat hackers have the same desire to find new security vulnerabilities that black-hat hackers have, white hats use the knowledge that they gain to protect computer systems, not to attack them. Sometimes, however, it can be difficult to distinguish a black hat from a white hat; in fact, it looks gray. For example, what color is the hat of a hacker who destroys another hacker's data in order to protect the innocent?
