MiniBin

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on November 10, 2011

MiniBin is a free recycling bin for your Windows system tray, also known as the notification area. It lets you open or empty the Recycle Bin from the system tray, or drag and drop items into it. It can serve as a Recycle Bin replacement if you're using a desktop environment that hides or disables the default bin. But it also makes a great little trash bin, sort of an ashtray for the system tray. It even includes some themes for changing the tray icon's look.

After we installed MiniBin, we clicked the system tray and selected Customize to open the Notification Area Icons tool in the Control Panel. We changed MiniBin's settings to show its icon all the time. This makes MiniBin much more useful by keeping it always visible in the system tray. A colored graph effect indicated items in the Recycle Bin. We right-clicked the program's icon and clicked Open, which opened the main Recycle Bin. Selecting Clean emptied the bin. Clicking Configuration let us confirm deletes, enable slow updates for slow systems, and similar options. Clicking themes let us change the shape of the MiniBin tray icon; we could also open the themes directory from the menu. Hovering the cursor over the tray icon popped up the program's name and Web site. Clicking Quit exited MiniBin with no ill effects on our default Recycle Bin.

That's all there is to MiniBin, but it's all you need. We think MiniBin is a great idea and a neat little tool. Since it's freeware, you have nothing to lose by trying it, except of course the stuff you want to delete!