Emptying trash

[H. Dewey Norton]

My mother's old Mac LC died a few weeks ago and we decided that the cheapest option was for my father to get a new iMac (he had one of the second-generation CRT iMacs [the one AFTER Bondi blue]) and pass his old iMac to my mother. All she wants to do is play Solitaire so it should do fine (as long as it continues to work).

I transferred all my father's files to his new iMac (17-inch 2Ghz LCD); there are some problems there, but I'll save them for another post.

For my mother, I tried to throw away everything that she won't need since I hope to free up some space on the hard drive to make it run faster and also know that if an icon shows up on the screen, she'll click on it and we'll blow the entire afternoon getting things cleaned up again. When I tried to empty the trash can, almost immediately I got prompts saying that this or that file was locked and I clicked on "Continue" again and again, thinking I'd go back and unlock those individual files once the majority had been flushed out. However, after well over 200 such clicks, I decided to stop since there was a total of over 12,000 files in the trashcan waiting to be dealt with. Is there some way to empty all those files at once (without individually unlocking them) or is the only option to just to re-initialize the hard drive and re-install the one or two programs she'll use?

Her iMac is a 400 Mhz PowerPC G3 running OSX version 10.4.

[Chris Waldrip]

Hold down the option key, I believe, and it will attempt to delete even locked files.

[H. Dewey Norton]

Thanks, Chris.

I had to hold down the "Option" key for a L-O-N-G time before the trash can was empty, but it freed up almost 2 GB of space on the hard drive.

Dewey

[Chris Waldrip]

Should have mentioned that you only should have needed to hold down Option when starting to delete the trash. Not for the whole delete process. Oops! 

Glad it worked.