Windows App of the Week: WinDirStat
This is almost an excuse, as all Windows users should already know about WinDirStat. This app has been out for almost 15 years and it is one of the most useful tools you can use to clean up your hard drive.
At Lifehacker, we take spring cleaning very seriously. We are far from missing out on an opportunity to refresh, reorganize and streamline our home life. We’re also very excited to hit the reset button with our technology, take a close look at our finances, and get the better of our day-to-day habits that have gotten a little musty. Welcome to Spring Cleaning Week, during which we clear the winter cobwebs and set the stage for the sunny days ahead. Let’s clean up, okay?
WinDirStat is completely free; shouldn’t be, considering how awesome it is, but it is. To make it work wonders, you just download one file and that’s it. While we’d like to have a portable version of WinDirStat, the installation process doesn’t take long (and takes up almost no space). When you close the installation routine, WinDirStat is loaded by default.
When the application opens, you choose the location that WinDirStat will scan. This could be your entire primary hard drive, a secondary hard drive you’re using that’s mysteriously filling up with storage, or just the contents of your custom Windows folder (or images, or downloads, etc.). The program then starts running on its magic, traversing every folder, subfolder and file in the area of your choice.
WinDirStat displays the content found as a large, naughty image at the bottom of the application. It also shows your folders in ascending order in size and continues to appear as you click on them to dive deeper and deeper into the contents of your drive. This makes it incredibly easy to find mysterious folders that take up gigabytes of space (or worse), which could very well be the result of accidentally copying and pasting a large movie, some crazy thing going on with your temporary files on Windows, or a huge number of pornographic Linux distributions. that you forgot about.
As poisonous as your file may be, WinDirStat is the antidote to a hard drive running out of space – which I bet is user error seven times out of ten, and Windows error the other three. While you can even use WinDirStat to create special routines to clean up your drives and folders, such as deleting every .BAK or .TMP file it can find, you’re better off using WinDirStat’s helpful information as a guideline for a lot of File Explorer deletions. Free up your precious space, Windows users. It couldn’t be easier.
Do you have a Windows app (paid or free) that you really like? Tell us about it: [email protected] .