Troubleshooting Your PC For Dummies®

Chapter 4. The R Chapter (Reinstall, Restore, Recycle, Recover)

For some reason, many useful troubleshooting tools start with the letter R. This is most likely related to the rich resource of words in English that deal with happy things and also start with the letter R: rescue, recovery, repair, restore, refund, recline, resolve, remember, refresh, rejoice, rich, recreation, redhead, rum, Rio, and the rest. Really!

With computers, the R retinue repeats: Restore, Reinstall, Recycle, and Recover. With those fine utilities, you can assist your PC in respite from a range of ravages and risks. Indeed, this chapter is brought to you by the letter R.

Restoring from the Recycle Bin

To ease the panic that sets in when you can't find a file, you need to do two things: First, use the Search command to try to locate the file (this topic is covered in Chapter 9); second, check the Recycle Bin to see whether the file was accidentally deleted:

1. 

   If the Recycle Bin icon cannot be found on the desktop, open a Windows Explorer window (press Win+E on the keyboard) and choose the Recycle Bin from the list of folders displayed on the left side of the window.

2. Choose Details from the toolbar's View button menu.

The Recycle Bin window, shown in Figure 4-1, displays information about deleted files in several columns: Name, Original Location, Date Deleted, and Size, for example. The number of columns you see depends ...