How to Analyze and Manage Hard Drive Space

Have you noticed your hard drive has been slowly filling up? If you’ve had your machine for a while, a lot of extra “stuff” can build up over time. Whether it’s temporary files from your browser, old music files in your iTunes library, or something else, it can be tricky to hunt down and delete junk files.

Solution

Fortunately, WinDirStat, a program that rapidly indexes your entire hard drive, creates a visual map of every file, and helps you delete the stuff you don’t need.

Installation
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Using WinDirStat

When first launching WinDirStat you get the option to select All or Individual drives, you can even choose to scan a single folder. For this example I will go ahead and scan my local drive.
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While scanning you can view the progress. Check out the cool Pac-Man animations! I am such a sucker for geek nostalgia.Image:B.png
The scan tool a bit under a minute, and you end up with a nice graphical representation of the files on your hard drive.

WinDirStat has three sections the Directory List, Extension List, and the graphically crazy colored Treemap. The colors on the extension list correspond with the location of the type of file on the Treemap.

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Use different view options to change the look of the utility or amount of data shown in the Treemap. When you mouse over a certain section on the Treemap you can choose to clean that file up, look at its properties, or open the directory it is in via Windows Explorer.

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Of course there are customizable settings, here is an example of changing the Treemap color patterns.

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Tips

The Treemap provides the ability to easily go to each directory or individual file on a hard drive. It is also a very nice graphical representation of each type of file extension. If you have ever wondered what files are taking up so much space this will neatly show you the culprit and allow them to be cleaned directly from the GUI. WinDirStat will work on all versions of Windows from 95 up to Vista. This is great for legacy systems still operation that need maintenance.

See also

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When Windows Operating System saves data to your hard disk, it will split them into several fragments, because there may not have continuous blocks to store a single large file. As you may anticipate, a build-up of fragmented data on your computer slows down its performance substantially. This tutorial will guide you Analyze and Defragment Hard Disk with Paragon Hard Disk Manager.
Most of developers are quite familiar in creating MSI. But now let me talk about a free tool, by which you can analyze and manange the MSI. It called MSI Explorer.

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