As time passes with the digital advances of this era, we need to enlarge our storage space. Whether you’re a gamer, a photographer, or graphic designer, the drive space never seems to be enough.
How many times have we seen that tedious “There is not enough space on the disk” message? More often than not, we spend a lot of time trying to figure out where those heavy files in the system are to free up just a bit of space.
Luckily, we have a software that can analyze our system and tell us where those large files are located. WinDirStat is a free, open-source disk usage statistics viewer and cleaning tool for Microsoft Windows. This software is not going to clean your disk, but it’s a very helpful tool for you to visualize where the memory is being used up, helping you to organize the data on your computer.
Looking through an old HDD, if there is any valuable data left. WinDirStat is still my favorite tool for that. https://t.co/5nAkYcwvaN pic.twitter.com/SiAjMnEhko
— Luca Hammer (@luca) October 4, 2017
Organizing your hard drive space better
WinDirStat reads the whole directory tree and shows you the information in three different views. The first one on the left side is the directory list in a tree view of the Windows Explorer that’s sorted by file size. Right below is the treemap where you can see the whole content of the directory tree sorted by colors. If you click on any of these colors, it will take you to the actual file. The last view on the right side is the extension list which can show the statistics about the file types.
The software runs on Windows 95 (IE5), Windows 98 SE, Windows ME, Windows NT4 (SP5), Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, 8, and 8.1. It may work in other Windows versions, but the developers haven’t tested it.
Analyzing disk space usage
To begin, you can download the software for free. It’s only 800kb and it can be installed in a matter of seconds without any bloatware or things you don’t want. Once installed on your computer, just open it and select the disk you want to analyze. You can have it analyze a local partition or the full hard drive.
WinDirStat will automatically start working, and you will see the little Pac-mans on the ‘Subtree Percentage’ section moving back and forth to analyze all your data. Once it’s finished, you will see all your data on the screen. You can easily visualize which files are taking more space on your drive and delete them from there with a right-click.
In the ‘Options’ section in the top menu, you will find ‘Configure WinDirStat’. From there, you can customize the software like changing the colors, brightness, showing grids and stripes, and choosing the language. Currently, there are 12 different languages available for this software.
The WinDirStat makes it easier to visualize what you don’t need when you’re running out of space. If you found this free software useful, you can also choose to support the developer by donating.
YouTube: WinDirStat – Disk Usage Statistics Viewer and Cleanup Tool for Windows – #TechTip
Photo credits: The feature image has been taken by John Schnobrich. The image in the body of the article is owned by WinDirStat and has been provided for press usage.
