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.

 I found this nifty little freeware utility that will quickly and easily cleanup the various browsers temp files, browsing history, cookies, system prefetch, Windows temp files and various other clutter on your computer. So this utility can help in keeping your privacy of what you do on your computer, as well as reducing various clutter to help further save disk space as well as helping to improve system performance.

Whether you are using Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox, IE Privacy Keeper automatically cleans up the browser history once you are done surfing the net. The program will correctly clean up all index.dat files without the need for a Windows restart.

Special unique features of IE Privacy Keeper allow you to conceal the cleanup. You can keep selective items in the browsing history and hide the program form the list of running applications. Secure deletion will make any attempts to recover deleted items fail.

OS Supported:
* Windows XP
* Windows 2000
* Windows Server 2003
* Windows NT SP6
* Windows ME
* Windows 98

Browsers Supported:
* Internet Explorer 5.5 and higher
* Mozilla Firefox 1.0 and higher

For more information on Privacy Keeper, Click Here.

For a link to directly download Privacy Keeper now, Click Here.

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In this post I will offer some suggestions that you can apply to your Hard Drives that can help to get a better performance, and therefore a boost in overall speed for your computer.

I'll be explaining how to do these tweaks for a Windows XP operating system, however you can most likely apply the same tweaks to most other versions of Windows using either the same or similar procedures.

Disable the "Indexing Service" on your hard-drives.
The Indexing Service is usually turned-on by default by Windows. In fact this is a fairly resource wasting option to have enabled, and will continually be accessing your Hard-Drives in the background, which overall slows things down as well as adding unnecessary wear-and-tear on your Hard Drives.

Having this feature enabled is supposed to allow for faster searching and locating of files on your computer; when you click on "Start" and you click on the "Search" option to look for where you may have put a folder or file. But really, how often do you use that "Search" option? And even if you disable the Indexing Service, the Search option still works fine except you may just need to wait a few extra seconds longer for Windows to locate the file you're searching for. 

So I highly recommend to disable the fairly useless and resource-hogging Indexing Service feature.
How to do this? Well, one easy way is to simply to double-click on the "My Computer" icon on your desktop, or to right-click on the "start" button then choose to "Explore". A window should then open up that displays the main Hard Drive(s) connected to your computer, example (C:), (D:), (E:), etc... depending on how many Hard Drives or storage devices you have on your computer. Of course you may have already renamed the Hard Drive label to something else to your choosing.

Anyways, let's take the (C:) drive as our example; Right-Click on the (C:) drive, and then from the menu that pops-up choose the "Properties" option.  Now you should see a window open up that displays information about your Hard Drive as well as various settings or tasks you might perform.

Below is a picture I took from my computer to show you what this window might look like

You see several Tabs along the top of the window: "General", "Tools", "Hardware", etc...
By default, this property box window should open into the "General" Tab already, which is where we want to be.

Look towards the bottom of this window, and you'll see a couple of options, one reads "Compress Drive to save space", I would suggest to always leave this option always UN-CHECKED as well, because if you do check it, it can in fact end up slowing down your computer.

Now you'll see the next option reads "Allow Indexing Service.....". If you see that the little box next to this option has a check-mark in it, this is what we want to remove. Click on the little box to remove the check-mark. Now that we have changed the setting, you should see the "Apply" button towards the lower-right of the window turn on. Now click on the "Apply" button. Okay, now you'll have to sit back and wait a little while as Windows gets busy un-Indexing the hard-drive. You may get asked a dialog-box question, select the option that reads like "All folders and files". Now at some point, the un-indexing process may seem to be interrupted by a dialog that pops-up and read something like "Can not disable indexing on this file. What do you want to do?", in this case it is most likely a protected Windows file that is not allowing the setting to be changed for that specific file. In that case don't worry. Just click on the "Ignore all" button to continue with the process. The overall process may take a few minutes, or it might take much longer depending on the overall size of your hard-drive along with how many folders and files it needs to process, so be patient until it finishes.

Now, the next suggestion I would now make is to do Defragmentation, of your Hard Drive. From the Hard Drive Properties Box Window (as seen in the picture above), now click on the "Tools" Tab.
Here is a picture of what options you might see now:

You'll see an "Error Checking" button, which is good to do once in a while (perhaps once a month or so would be fine, or if your hard drive seems to be having some kind of problems on booting up or other similar problems), and I would suggest to check the "Automatically fix file system errors" . This would set Windows to do an Error Checking the next time you turn on or restart your computer. Upon booting up, you'd see that you've scheduled to run an Error Check on the drive, you could press a key to skip it, or just wait a moment and allow the Error Checking to continue. It could take a few minutes to complete, and if the process did find any errors, it would hopefully have been able to repair any problems. 

Anyways, you can run that Error Checking option later, as for now we want to look at the Defragmentation option. Click the "Defragment Now" button. You will then be shown a Disk Defragmenter window, which looks something like the picture below:

You'll see a list of all the Hard Drives on your computer. Select the hard drive you want to run a Defrag on, in this example it's the C: drive, so by clicking on the C: line in the window you'll see a blue highlight for that drive now to let us know we have selected that hard drive. If you like you could run an "Analyze" first. This will take a moment to do, and it will give you an idea of how bad the fragmention on your Hard Drive is. The more Red color you see on the graph picture, the more badly fragmented the hard drive is and you should probably run the "Defragment" option on it.

A word of warning though, depending on the size of the hard drive and how many files it needs to defrag, it can take a long while to complete the task. It's best to now leave your computer alone and let the Defragmention task run. If you try to use the computer while it's defragmenting, your computer will seem really slow, as well you may be unintentionally interrupting and hindering the process. So now might be a good time to go have a cup of coffee, go watch some TV, go for a walk, do some errands, have a nap, or whatever else to pass the time.

Now after doing these two tasks, turning off the Indexing Service and doing a Defragmention, I would suggestion you do the same for all of your Hard Drives. Yes, it may take a while to complete this, but once it is done, and after rebooting your computer, you will probably see an overall better speed and performance from your computer.

Turning off the Indexing Service, you'll only need to do the one time per hard drive you have. But for running the Defragmentation task, I might suggest you do this on a regular basis, perhaps about once a month or so would be okay. More or less depending on how quickly your hard drives get badly fragmented.

Hope these suggestions was of help to some of you out there.
I'll soon be posting up more tweaking tips.
Cheers!