How to Delete Items to Your Recycle Bin & Restore Them

Video Transcript

"Hi. I'm Michael Burton with michaelburtonfilms.org located in Salt Lake City, Utah. We're here talking about using Microsoft Windows. Now I want to talk to you about how to delete objects to your recycle bin and then how to restore them if you accidentally delete something. Let me start off by saying that Windows XP is a registered trademark of Microsoft and I am in no way affiliated with Microsoft. Okay let's say you need to delete an item from your desktop. For example, over here on the left is this HD opener file that I currently have here. Let's say I want to delete this item. So I'm going to right click on it and I'm going to choose delete, or I'm going to left click and hold on the item and drag it up to the recycle bin, and drop it in my recycle bin. That's because I want to delete that program. Now, just because that item is in the recycle bin does not mean that it's off the computer. That file still exists. Now, you can even double click on the recycle bin or you can right click. If you double click on the recycle bin it'll open the recycle bin and you can see that there are a number of files located in this recycle bin that have not been deleted. They're just sitting here waiting to be deleted. So in order to get rid of all these items in the recycle bin what we're going to do is - there's a couple of ways to get rid of all these items. One, if you notice now that you've opened the recycle bin on your left hand side if you scroll down here, there's an option that says empty the recycle bin. If I were to click on this it would give me an option that says would you like to delete all the files? Actually, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and take this HD opener out, and then I'm going to click empty the recycle bin so I can show you the demonstration. So I see "Are you sure you want to delete these 14 items?" I'm going to go ahead and click yes and now these items have been erased from the computer. Now, there are ways to restore these, but usually you have to use a program besides what you currently have on the computer. You usually have to buy a program like system utilities or some sort of restoration program that can actually restore a lot of the deleted files that you've deleted - if you've accidentally deleted something that you didn't want to delete. Now, let's say for example this HD opener over here on the desktop that we put in the recycle bin and we decided that we didn't want to delete that. We didn't want to do that. There's a couple of ways, and you've already seen me do one of them. You can open the recycle bin and just take the HD opener file and drag it right back to the desktop. That restores it right back to the desktop, or if it's inside the recycle bin you can right click on the file and then highlight restore and it'll automatically restore it back to where you got it from."