The answer to the first part is yes, if you do the following. If you're using a Windows OS, delete the file. There are multiple methods to accomplish this, including the command line and explorer. In theory, some of the space the file occupied is saved at this point, which is for recovery purposes, and the file is moved to the Recycle Bin. Because of this, you don't get all the used hard drive space back, since some is needed for the file name in Recycle Bin, as well as maintaining the pointers to the file itself. To accomplish part two of your question, empty the Recycle Bin by right clicking the mouse on the icon, select Empty Recycle Bin, left click and then answer yes when prompted. The file is now marked "deleted" in the file allocation table of your particular OS, and the OS will eventually overwrite the space that the file occupied with something else. So, even though the space now shows as free, the information of the file still exists where it was, there just isn't the initial pointer from the FAT to the beginning of the file, which is why the free space looks like it's there. Final step is run defrag on your hard drive. While it's not as effective as a shredder in terms of making the file unrecoverable, which was suggested previously, it will "give the megabytes back" for future use that you are asking about. Defrag is a simple utility that's been around since the days of DOS, and will sometimes do a decent job of reducing wasted space on your hard drive. For what your asking, this is an extra step, not always necessary since the file space previously used by your deleted file is now free to be used by something else, but is a good maintenance routine to get into. Deleting lots of small files should result in complete recovery of the previously used space, but due to the nature of how various OS's, including Windows, store files, you could end up with less than expected free space. Running defrag, or a similar third party utility, will help recover space that would otherwise be unusable.