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Move Recycle Bin to the Windows 10 System Tray


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Move Recycle Bin to the Windows 10 System Tray 

While many people forget the Windows Recycle Bin exists and they delete files using the magic Shift + Delete keyboard shortcut, there is no doubt this continues to be a valuable Windows feature that helps prevent accidents and critical data loss.

While many people forget the Windows Recycle Bin exists and they delete files using the magic Shift + Delete keyboard shortcut, there is no doubt this continues to be a valuable Windows feature that helps prevent accidents and critical data loss.

The Recycle Bin itself hasn’t evolved too much in the last few Windows iterations, pretty much because the concept is pretty simple and there’s not much to improve about it.

It plays the role of a bin where your deleted files are stored before you remove them once and for all, so the refinements that Microsoft can implement are minor, to say the least.

However, one of the features that users have been asking for, but which the software giant has until now ignored, is an option to bring the Recycle Bin to the system tray for quick access no matter what they do.

While pinning the Recycle Bin to the Start menu or the taskbar is indeed possible, adding a fully functional icon to the system tray isn’t a Windows feature for the time being. And unfortunately, there’s pretty much no other way around it.

But on the other hand, a small application called MiniBin does the whole thing for us and creates a system tray icon for Recycle Bin that provides us with the essential feature package and even more.
 
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First and foremost, this application can be used on all versions of Windows, not just on Windows 10, with all features available everywhere.

After installing it, Minibin adds a trash icon in the system tray, and a simple mouse hover displays the total size of files currently in the Recycle Bin.

NOTE: With the default configuration, double-clicking the Minibin icon in the system tray empties the Recycle Bin, so all files there are removed. You can change this behavior from the settings screen.

To further configure the app, you can just right-click this icon, and you are allowed to tweak the aforementioned double-click gesture to open the Recycle Bin instead of deleting files.

Additionally, Minibin comes with sounds for emptying Recycle Bin and a progress window that is displayed whenever you delete files permanently.

The icons displayed in the system tray can be further customized based on your preferences. Minibin can display different icons depending on how large the files in the Recycle Bin are, and you are allowed to use your own icons if you want a completely personalized experience.
 
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The installation of Minibin lets you configure the app to run at system boot, so the icon will always be there in the system tray. This is clearly an option that most people would use, as enabling the app manually every time they start the computer isn’t obviously the most convenient thing to do.

The application is extremely light on system resources, and if your computer has the hardware to run Windows 10, you should have absolutely no problem to keep Minibin active all the time.

For the time being, Microsoft doesn’t seem to be looking into similar features for Windows 10, and the next major update for the operating system does not include such capabilities. Currently codenamed Windows 10 19H1, the upcoming feature update is projected to be finalized in March and then released to users beginning with April. Users can try it out by downloading Windows Insider builds.

The best we can do right now is to post a feedback suggestion in the Feedback Hub to convince Microsoft to create a system tray icon for the Recycle Bin, so if you’d like to see this added to Windows 10 in the coming updates, you know what you have to do.
 
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