Tip Thursday - Get Rid of Confirm Delete Box

Every day of the week has a media soubriquet: Tech Tuesday; Wednesday’s Child; Triple Shot Friday, etc.

Hence, it is with great pride that we at Tech Insider introduce Tip Thursday.

Every Thursday we’ll post a new technology tip. The audience we're aiming for is not computer geeks who tweak Linux for fun, but for the rest of us: People who deal with technology on a daily basis and wouldn’t mind a tip about how to do it more efficiently and easily; folks who aren’t engineers but still need to know what a T1 carrier line is. We’ll present useful shortcuts, helpful definitions and short explanations of technology concepts. We hope you like it, and also hope you send us your own suggestions. For our first tip, please read on.

This week: Remove that pesky “confirm file delete” dialogue box from Microsoft Windows.

If you’ve used Windows (and almost everyone of us has), any time you try to delete a file, up sprouts a dialogue box asking are you sure you want to send this file to the Recycle Bin?

As David S. Platt writes in Why Software Sucks, the question has become worthless. “You’ve seen it so often that it doesn’t register,” he says. “No one pays attention to it, even when it’s warning you of a file you really don’t want to delete.”

Of course, sometimes we do make mistakes, click the wrong file, or accidently slip the mouse pointer down a file. That’s where the real safety features comes in: Nothing is really deleted if it’s moved to the Recycle Bin; it’s just been moved to another portion of the hard drive. If you really want it, go into the Recycle Bin and retrieve it. To get rid of it forever, empty the Recycle Bin.

Luckily, you can get rid of this annoying dialogue box:

”Right click on the Recycle Bin, select Properties from the pop-up menu, and uncheck the 'Display delete confirmation dialog' checkbox,” Platt writes.

That's all there is to it.