My recycle bin is set to 10% of the drive size in this case 2.5 Gigs so I thought that by changing it to 1/2 a Gig I would gain 2 Gigs in available drive space . Strangly this doesn't seem to be the case . Anybody tell me why not ? cheers
Well you won't gain anything. The 10% of drive space refers to how much the recycle bin is allowed to contain before it starts discarding stuff, but the space is not reserved in advance, so an empty recycle bin doesn't take any space at all.
To put it another way, 10% is not the size of the recycle bin, but the maximum combined size of all "deleted" files before the operating system decides that the bin is full.