Very cool freeware tool!

For the longest time I have been wanting a tool for Windows that could tell me what is taking up space on my hard drive, and how much it is taking. Back in the "old days" I had Norton Desktop for Windows (3.1) that had a built-in directory scanning tool that could tell me this information. I found it quite useful.

WinDirStat is available for download as freeware, and it scans your system (you can choose which drives to scan) to report both in tree view and graphically how much space various files and directories are consuming. See a big green blob in the middle of the graphic view (it's a mass of rectangles of various sizes, all crammed together like a Dada Aztec wall) click on it and you can find out all kinds of information. Maybe that big blob is a backup of a file for a piece of software you don't even own, anymore. Maybe it's taking up 600MB and hasn't been looked at since 1998 (I have such files, too!). Think you can get rid of it? Yeah, probably.

One thing they mention: you can't select multiple files for deletion. You have to select and delete them one at a time. It's a pain if, for example, you are attempting to clean out your TEMP directory. In this case I would recommend opening a Windows Explorer window and using that to clean up the unneeded files. Then return to WinDirStat and refresh the cleaned-up directory. Conveniently, it sorts stuff by size, with the biggest things at the top.

If you're not completely comfortable in the knowledge of what you can remove, and what should stay, then I would err on the side of caution and not delete something you might really want. Of course, if you delete to the recycle bin the file(s) will still be around in case you need to undelete. Out of paranoia and habit I always keep things in the recycle bin for a few months just to be sure I really don't need them. Yes, I am paranoid, but I've been around long enough to know that shiat happens, and despite your best efforts, there will be times you will blow something away and then really, really wish you hadn't.

Anyway, check out this cool tool. Oh, and don't be no fool, neither.