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Disk Usage Utility

WinDirStat: Colorful Representations of Hard Drive Usage

SUMMARY: WinDirStat for Windows offers multiple representations of hard drive usage to help you see what is taking up the most space. Includes support for network drives.

Curious about what is taking up your hard drive space, or are you a network administrator finding your network storage is filling up and want to see if unauthorized movies and music are to blame? WinDirStat, an open-source disk usage analyzer for Windows, can help. The program offers details in three ways - a directory list, extension list, and a very detailed (and colorful) Treemaps representation that supports zooming in and out.

Features include support for network drives; multiple languages including English, German, Italian, Russian, and Spanish; toggling on or off a "Pacman" animation while performing the drive scan; adjusting the Treemaps style and tweaking settings such as brightness; and the ability to send an e-mail report to a directory's owner in network environments.

Analyzing a hard drive with WinDirStat

A "Clean Up" menu offers the ability to jump directly to a selected item in Explorer, open the command prompt in the selected directory, and delete selected items with options for Recycle Bin and permanent deletion. You can also define your own cleanup options.

WinDirStat runs on Windows 95 - Windows Vista. Windows 7 support is not mentioned and was not tested for this tip. The software can be downloaded at the following address:

* WinDirStat: http://windirstat.info/

This tip was written regarding WinDirStat 1.1.2.80 (Unicode) running on a Windows XP machine. Features, information, and screenshots for other versions /operating systems may vary.