Running out of hard disk space? Need to find out which folders are taking up the most space? Earlier I wrote about a useful program called TreeSize that can be used to quickly find the largest directories on disk. However, it would be really nice if you could just see the folder size while browsing in Windows Explorer. Instead, only the file size is displayed in the explorer interface.
This is what the typical Windows Explorer interface looks like in Details view:
So if you want to find out which folders are taking up a lot of space, you need to manually right-click each of them and select Properties. It’s just boring and annoying! Why not just use Windows Explorer to calculate the folder sizes and display them for you?
The folder size does it for us. Folder Size is a free Windows utility that adds a new column to the Details view in Windows Explorer for Windows XP. The new column displays not only the file size, but also the folder size. It also keeps track of which folders you are viewing and scans them in the background so you can see the full size of all files in the folder.
In Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8, the program cannot edit the Explorer interface, so instead it loads floating windows to the right of the Explorer screen.
Here are some of its main features:
- No need to switch to another program to view folder sizes. It also appears in the Open and Save dialog boxes (Windows XP only).
- No scan is required before starting, folder sizes are displayed immediately. Large folders are scanned in the background while browsing.
- The window automatically updates the folder sizes in real time.
The software currently runs on Windows 2000 and Windows XP, so the column is displayed directly in Explorer. On Windows Vista and later, a pop-up window is displayed instead. A popup is not the best solution, and it can get a little annoying after a while. Fortunately, it closes when you close the explorer.
The developer realized this annoying problem and also made a small icon in the taskbar so you can close the popup when you don’t need it and just click the taskbar icon whenever you want to see the folder sizes. After a few minutes, the program scanned all the folders on my disk, and I was able to immediately see the folder sizes.
If you don’t want the pop-up to appear at all when you open an instance of Explorer, just right-click the icon in the taskbar and uncheck the Show folder size checkbox. This way, you can just run the job in the background, and whenever you want to see the folder sizes, just click the icon in the taskbar to open the window.
The software also supports a 64-bit machine, so that should make some people happy. There are some known software issues that the developer hopes to fix in the next release, and these include:
1. Sometimes the Windows directory will be larger than the actual size due to the use of hard links. in system.
2. The background service can sometimes encounter permission issues on certain machines.
3. Background scanning in Windows Vista and higher is not fully optimized yet.
4 Occasionally a pop-up window covers the close button in the Windows Explorer interface.
I have not encountered any of these problems when running the program on Windows 7, but you should be aware of them as they can cause problems. Overall, this is a good program, but I would like a developer to be able to hack Windows 7/8 so that the size is displayed as a column instead of in a separate window. That said, it’s close, and with the hide options and the fact that it closes with Explorer, it’s still a utility I’d use. Enjoy!
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