14 DAY TRIAL // Recycle Bin is one of the features in Windows I least expected to encounter a third party replacement for. And yet, here comes minibin, a small application specially designed to take over the purpose of the Windows icon and allow you to perform the final deletion of the data straight from the system tray or notification area.
Although it may be hard to believe the freebie can be viewed as a better version of the default Recycle Bin in Windows. There aren’t too many advantage but it is different and for some users it may come as a better alternative to what Microsoft offers in their operating system.
The small app comes wrapped as a 57KB which holds an almost 100KB installer. Although it can be used in portable mode, the developer makes you go click-through the simple installation process in order to put it on the system. There are no additional elements pushed through this procedure.
As soon as you have it on the system you will notice a small bin icon in the system tray or notification area for Windows 7 users. I have to say that minibin’s trash can icon (which is just a line drawing) is a bit hard on the eye compared to the slick look of the original in Windows.
Simple looks aside, if you are running Windows 7 minibin would be of more help if moved in the system tray rather than the notification area (customize the notification area to bring it to system tray) as you would have permanent access to the trash can. This is one of the advantages of the app over Recycle Bin as you can handle the trash without having to access the desktop area; I admit it is not a common scenario, though.
However, knowing the total weight of the discarded data may be a more frequent request. All you have to do to learn this in minibin is hold your mouse over its tray icon. It will immediately show the size of the can content in bytes, megabytes or gigabytes.
To quickly empty it and make more room on the hard disk all you have to do is double click the icon. The icon becomes void in an instant and if you still keep Recycle Bin icon it will confirm the operation.
Despite being extremely simple minibin features a configuration panel where you can adjust the way the application behaves. It automatically starts with Windows, but it can also play a sound when the can is emptied (it is the default sound in the operating system and you cannot customize it); additionally, when dealing with loads of data, it can show a progress bar informing you of the stage of the operation.
The application does not come with any language packs, and it does not need to because it allows you to change the name of the options in the context menu of the tray icon yourself. Simply rename them to whatever suits you best.
minibin works by constantly monitoring the Recycle Bin and for this some CPU power is needed. If you put it on a feebler machine and notice increased processor usage it would be a good idea to extend the update time in the settings window.
On our test machine (Dual Core 2GHz with 3GB of RAM) the resource usage was nothing significant. minibin required about 6MB of RAM to function properly, while CPU usage did not tilt at all, not even when we eliminated 9GB of junk data.
This application is not designed to look pretty but to offer the functionality the default solution in Windows doesn’t. However, a redesign of the icon would make identification a lot easier on portable computers. The lack of other options like the possibility to customize the icon itself, or to change the color when there are items in the can would come in really handy for some users.
All in all it is a simple instrument that gives you access to Recycle Bin as long as Windows taskbar is visible. Thus it saves you the time to switch to the desktop to access or empty it.
You can change the name of the options for the system tray icon to whatever makes you feel more comfortable. Holding the mouse over its icon shows you the amount of data in the bin. It would be nice to give the user the possibility to change the icon as well as the color of a full bin. Informing the user on the usage percentage of the space allotted for the recycle bin would also be a nice touch. Update: It looks like the application offers a way to change its bin icons. The "readme" file in the program's installation folder informs of the steps required to do that. All you need are two images (ICO format) to represent an empty bin and a full one and store them where minibin.exe resides. We tried it with 128x128 icons and it worked fine on Windows 7.
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