Political Correctness and the Windows Desktop: How to rename "Recycle Bin" to "Garbage Can"

12 December 2003 | Lexinom

[Lexinom]

Ever get annoyed that you can rename any icon on your Windows PC's desktop except for the recycle bin? A little playing around in the Registry and I found out how to eliminate this politically-correct subtlety from my machine. Here's how, in layman's terms:

* From the Start menu, select "Run".
* Type "regedit" then [enter].
* When regedit comes up, click "My Computer" in the left pane.
* Press or select "Find..." from the "Edit" menu.
* Type in the following in the "Find what:" box:
645FF040-5081-101B-9F08-00AA002F954E
* (optionally, you can copy and paste the above from this page.)
* In the right pane, you will see "(Default) REG_SZ Recycle Bin". Right-click the "(Default)" icon, and select "Modify" from the pop-up menu.
* Change the Value data to something other than Recycle Bin.

Congratulations! You've taken back a little piece of your desktop from the politically-correct crowd.

Disclaimer: This works for Windows 2000 and Windows XP. I have not tried in on Windows 95, 98, or ME, but the procedure should be the same. It only changes the icon name and title in the window. It does not change all instances of "Recycle Bin".

If anyone knows how to change the icon, please do share this!

[Clinging Bitterly]

Heh...
I use Norton System works, and it has a "recycle bin" that is somewhat enhanced. But you can change the title to anything you want with just a right click and "properties", like everything else on the desktop.

[gubamyster]

Ever get annoyed that you can rename any icon on your Windows PC's desktop except for the recycle bin?

You have too much time on your hands.

[DeepDish]

I used Norton under Win98. It now is identifed as "Norton $h*t can".

[Lexinom]

No, I make my living working on my home machine developing software. Just thought some other FReepers might appreciate the procedure.

[Lexinom]

Not on the Recycle Bin icon, you can't (at least under Win2K). I have that Norton stuff turned off because of the memory it consumes running in the background doing nothing 99.9% of the time, but you may be right if you actually have that enhanced recycle bin enabled.

[Johnny Gage]

Ok... Now we can have a contest to see who can come up with the "Best Recycle Bin Rename"

How about:

1) Hilary's closet
2) Bill's Humidor
3) Dumpster
4) Useless S**t

[Moleman]

I received the message "Error Editing Value"
"Error writing the values new contents"

[Lexinom]

Hmmm... Could very well be that you have to be an "Administrator" user. Big Brother M$oft tries to "protect" its users by disallowing them from doing certain things. America Online, who I spoke with Saturday over a bill dispute, even responded to my charges that their software installs all kinds of bloated, memory eating spyware, with "It's for your protection."

Assuming you're running XP or 2000, log into your machine as Administristor, password Administrator, and then try it. To do that, first do a Start->Shutdown->Logoff. (forgive me if you already know that stuff). Good luck.

[Lexinom]

Those are good ones. How about "Hollywood"?

[Johnny Gage]

When I searched for 645FF040-5081-101B-9F08-00AA002F954E

I found about 8 entries.

I changed different ones that had "Recycle Bin" as the data, but none of them changed the icon name on the desktop.

One entry did change the name of the "explore" window title bar though.

Any thoughts?

[Lexinom]

Just use the first one you come to, and ignore the rest: Note the key root: My Computer\HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID

You WILL need to restart your machine for it to take effect, since the key is read at boot time - the icon object has no way of being notified that it's key in the Registry has changed. It's kind of like needing to refresh a Free Republic web page to see new comments. I just tested it on XP (already did it on Win2K) and, unlike Win2k, there's somewhere else from where the name is being set. Try searching for "Recycle Bin" instead of that long GUID. I found a key that started with "@C:\" with that name, under MUICache, changed the value from "Recycle Bin" to "Trash" and am rebooting now.

[Lexinom]

That worked: The key to change for XP is:

My Computer\HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-21-20......(long number, may be different on yours)\Software\Microsoft\Windows\ShellNoRoam\MUICache.

Just search for "MUICache", or "Recycle Bin" until you get to the one in MUICache.

[Clinging Bitterly]

>> ...if you actually have that enhanced recycle bin enabled.

True, you can change that one, the title, directly from the desktop. I reckon there's a way to change the icon (of the regular recycle bin or any other) via the registry as well. If you ever used the old Win98 desktop themes, it had various icons for the recycle bin and all the others. I think XP and 2K have that too, but in earlier times when my computer didn't have the abundance of cheap memory, it seemed to me it bogged things down a bit. Now running XP Pro with more RAM aded to the same machine, the performance seems to be more constant whatever the extras are that I'm running, but I'm just bored with the themes (of which there were only about four that I thought had any coolness).

On Norton SystemWorks 2003 I just run autoprotect at the default settings, plus the protected recycle bin and LiveUpdate. Those don't seem to be a drag at all, but yeah, on a machine with less than today's usual 256 Megs of RAM, they seem to stop it in it's tracks.

[Lexinom]

You may be interested to know you can look at a lot of the dead weight spyware running on your computer by looking in the Registry at this key:

My Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

...and...

My Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

This is where a lot of the homepage hijacker and ad-popup stuff resides. Worse, some of it provides servers that run all the time that the vendor can check at any moment to get personal information about you and your browsing habits. Others are tasks that eat up RAM all the time even though they are features you rarely use - qttask.exe (Apple's quicktime) is a classic example, and its key can be safely deleted without disabling you from using QuickTime. All this bloat is why we have to have 256 megs of RAM (I REFUSE to buy more RAM than this, since I remember the days when 64K was considered generous, but that's just me).

Be careful what you delete, since some of the processes in the Run keys are legitimate components of the operating system, like WinStart.exe. If I don't know what something is, I do a "Search for Files" on my hard drive, find the file. If it's in the WINNT folder, I look at its properties to make sure it's not part of Microsoft Windows before deleting both the file and the key.

It's also a good idea to delete your cookies every so often, since they also can be used to track you. Just some thoughts.

[Lexinom]

BTW... if the word "spyware" here and in the above post appeared as an underlined link, you've got spyware running, since I didn't create it like that... Well, gotta take out the trash now ;-)

[Johnny Gage]

Thanks. Silly me forgot about the Reboot.

[Lexinom]

Naw. I should have included that in the instructions. Oh well, at least you've got a slightly less politically-correct desktop now :-)