How to discover space hogs on your hard drive

If you have a hard drive that is quickly approaching capacity, sorting through the files and folders for the ones taking up the most space can be a really time-consuming process. There’s an easier way to do it—it’s the subject of our latest Tech Tip.
For help identifying space hogs, let’s turn to TreeSize Free, which is available for Windows 8, as well as Windows 7, Vista, and XP.

For help identifying space hogs, let’s turn to TreeSize Free, which is available for Windows 8, as well as Windows 7, Vista, and XP. Launch the program, go to scan, and select the drive you want to take a look at. The application shows you, in gigabytes, megabytes, and kilobytes, how big each folder is, ranked from most to least.

One of the nice things you can do with TreeSize Free is drill down into subfolders to see what sort of space is being taken up. If I want to right click on a folder and see what the files are like or delete them, I can go ahead and do that.

Note that TreeSize Free does not dynamically update, so after you delete the data you’ll have to run the scan again to get an accurate count of files and data being stored.

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Anonymous
admin
Friday, May 03, 2013 ×

I use JDiskReport when I want to see which files/folders are taking up the most space on my drives. It's a simple Java program that doesn't even need to be installed, it can be launched with Java WebStart via a link on the page(though there are downloadable versions for Windows and Mac).

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Pedro Diaz
admin
Friday, May 03, 2013 ×

Nice helpful article!

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