Trying to figure out where all the space on your hard drive has gone is often quite a daunting task in Windows with all the hidden folders and temp directories! As an IT professional, I use the TreeSize tool almost every day, a little utility that tells you exactly where all of the hard drive space is currently allocated.
Using TreeSize Free edition, you can see at a glance which folders and subfolders are taking up the most space on your hard drive. With this information, you can quickly free up space on your hard drive occupied by temporary files or other useless data. TreeSize doesn’t even need to be installed, you can just double-click the EXE file to run it. This is really great because it means you can copy the entire program to a USB stick and run it right from there on any computer. Just remember to select the zipped executable when downloading.
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After installation, click on the “Scan” menu item and select the disk that you want to analyze. The good thing about the program is that you can use it not only for local hard drives, but also for CD, DVD or network drives.
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Wait a couple of minutes for the hard drive to be scanned, and then click the sort by size button in the upper right corner of the screen. This is the one with the numbers 1 and 9 and a down arrow. By default, it should already be selected.
Now you can see and view a list sorted from largest to smallest size of all folders on your hard drive.
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Using a Windows Explorer-like interface, you can click the plus sign next to each folder to view all subfolders and their sizes. This is how I found out that my WinSxS filder is 30GB! I ended up reducing it to 9GB and you can read my post on how to reduce the size of the WinSxS folder
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There are a few more buttons at the top of the program that allow you to change how the values ??are displayed (KB, MB, GB), display by the number of files in each folder (number of files), or by percentage instead of the actual size. You can also select just one folder to scan instead of the entire hard drive by clicking the folder icon in the far left corner. You can also print the report for future reference if you like.
If you really like the free version, you can buy the Personal or Professional version for around $ 24.95 and $ 54.95 respectively. These versions are for businesses or people who want to track disk space usage over several months and get more detailed reports and statistics on file types, usage, etc. For me, I’ve always used the free version and it worked great.
So download it and clean up your hard drive today! Always check Google for any unknown folders, as deleting them can cause system problems. Have questions, leave a comment. Enjoy!
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