Nicholas Clarke

While installing Visual Studio 2008 on my PC I started to get the not so friendly Windows low disk space pop-up. This was odd as I thought I had lot of spare space! So I opened up Windows Explorer to see what I could find only to find nothing. My PC has files all over the place put there by all kinds of programs.

Then I remembered WinDirStat, this program turned out to be my saviour.

After leaving it run for 10 minutes it came back with a very nice psychedelic version of my hard drive:

Not my real hard drive

On closer inspection I found that I had many unused Virtual PC instances and old ISO images.

WinDirStat is broken up into three sections each of which offers a different view of your data:

• TreeView

Shows the disk usage summary from a group of folders down to file level

• Type list

Colour coded with the psychedelic view so that types can been seen easily.

• Psychedelic colour view

This is by far the best view and with a quick glance you can see where all of your disk space has gone.

No matter what view you are in, selecting or hovering over any of the items will highlight the area in the psychedelic view and provide you with more information about the file. Its odd to see the same patterns repeated by user directories or the sheer size of virtual PC images.

Once you have found what you are looking for the application allows you to clean up the files directly by using the delete key or the clean up menu.

This is a great application and I have since seen some of my colleagues running it and playing with the psychedelic view.