From time immemorial, Windows has included a utility for cleaning up disk space — namely, Disk Cleanup, a.k.a. In Windows 10, users gained a second method to clean up disk space, part of its Settings-based “Storage Sense” facility, which is aimed at optimizing storage in Windows 10. Sep 07, 2011 Discuss: Clean up your Windows hard drive with WinDirStat Sign in to comment. Be respectful, keep it civil and stay on topic. We delete comments that violate our policy, which we encourage you to. Jul 20, 2020 The combination of Windows’ own Storage settings and WinDirStat might not magically clean up your hard drive, but they’ll help you make an informed decision on what to keep and what to delete. Windows 7 8.1 10 Great tool to see what uses disk space on your hard drive WINDIRSTAT - Duration: 4:50. Learn Windows 10 and Computers 5,981 views. This one’s almost a cop-out, since all Windows users should know about WinDirStat by now. This app has been out for nearly 15 years, and it’s one of the most helpful tools you can use to clean.
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Windirstat is a tool used to list, print disk, file, and folder size and related statistics on Windows operating systems. California driver's license barcode format. Actually, Windirstat is a clone of the Kdirstat which is developed for Linux distributions for KDE desktop environment where the
K
came from. The latest version of the WinDirStat is 1.1.2.80 which is released January 28, 2019. Windirstat can also clean up different types of files and directories easily. As stated Windirstat is the alternative for the KDirStat or QDirStat in Linux, Disk Inventory or GrandPerspective in MacOSX.
Features
We will examine the features of WinDirStat in detail below but here is a shortlist for the features of the WinDirStat.
- Support for most of the operating systems like Linux, Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, Fedora, Windows, MacOS
- Coloring of the file types and extensions
- Graphics to show file sizes
- Listing file and folders with their sizes with tree scheme
- Providing information like usage percentage, size, file, and attributes
Download WinDirStat
WinDirStat can be downloaded from the main site and also mirrors like FossHub, SourceForge, and Triple. Below you can select one of the links to download WinDirStat. For this case, we will select
Latest installer
which is version 1.1.2.Install WinDirStat
We will use regular
Next
and Next
install steps. When we click the setup file we will see following screen first.In the second screen, we will see the following screen where some installation options are provided. We can set or unset to create a desktop shortcut, languages etc.
In this step, we will specify the installation destination folder which is
C:Program FilesWinDirStat
.Following screen the final step of the WinDirStat installation where we can run it by checking
Run WinDirStat
checkbox.Scanning Drive and Folders
In order to print some information about the drive, directory, and files we need to scan specified drives, directories and files. We can scan for 3 different type which is
All Local Drives
where all currently connected drives will be scanned.Individual Drives
will scan only specified drives or partitions like C: or D: etc.A Folder
will scan the only specified folder.
File and Director Scan Results
When the scan is completed we will see a screen like below. There is 3 pane where directory list, file extensions and graphics are displayed. In this first pane following information is provided.
Name
of the directorySubtree Percentage
is the total size of the specified directoryPercentage
is the percentage of the specified directory according to its size to the partitionSize
is the size of the given file or directoryItems
is the total count of the files and directories which resides given directorySubdirs
is the total count of the only sub-directoriesLast Chance
is the last chance of the given file or directory
In the second pane following information about file extension or types and size is provided.
Extension
is the extension of the given files like.dll
, .exeetc
Color
is the color of the given file type or extensionDescription
is the extended name of the description of the given file type or extensionBytes
is the total size of the given extension or type of all files
The last pane which resides in the bottom of the two panes will provide a graphical representation of all file and directory types. The colors used to represent different files and file extensions or types.
As an example, we can see that
Windows
directory is the biggest directory where its size is 7.7 GB in this example and contains 55,479 items where 46,421 of them are files and 9,058 of them are subdirectories.Delete File or Directory
During the file and directory size inspection, we can find some unneeded files in order to delete or remove. We can delete these files and directories from the WinDirStat directly. There are 3 ways to delete a file or directory. First, we can right-click to the file or directory we want to delete which will open a menu which contains two
Delete
option.Delete (to Recycle Bin)
will delete given file or directory and send to the Recycle BinDelete (no way to undelete)
will as its explanation suggest where files and directories will be deleted where there will be no undelete option.
We can also use keyboard shortcuts
Del
will delete and send it to the recycle bin.Shift+Del
will delete directly.
We can also use the toolbar where there are two icons like below.
WinDirStat Alternatives In Windows
Even WinDirStat provides greate features there are some alternative which are very usefull like WinDirStat too. Inpage latest version. Below we will list some alternatives which provides similar functions to the WinDirStat.
SpaceSniffer
provides similar functions to the WinDirStat where big difference is SpaceSniffer does not contains directory list. But SpaceSniffer provides more useful GUI than the WinDirStat. TreeSize
is another alternative to WinDirStat. TreeSize provides simpler user interface and usage. It provides most of the WinDirStat features but doesn’t have extension. TreeSize has modern looking ribbon-style interface which makes it more stylish on the Windows 10. TreeSize has 3 versions where TreeSize Free
comes without a cost and TreeSize Personal
and TreeSize Professional
provides more features for a cost.Cleaning junk files from the computer every once in a while is a good practice and there are many free and powerful tools available for the purpose that we have already discussed in the past. These cleaning tools help you to get rid of the temporary files, browser cache and other Windows junk files that you don’t really require. Today however, we are going to concentrate on those large files, like movies, ISOs and games, that almost disappear in the nest of folders, quietly consuming the space you desperately need.
WinDirStat can help you isolate such large files so that the cleanup becomes easier. Let’s dig into the features of this software and how it works.
Using WinDirStat
WinDirStat is a free app for Windows that’s published under General Public License. The program is very small in size and installation is straightforward. Simply follow the on-screen instructions and complete the setup. While installing you can choose some additional language packs if needed.
Once you launch the program, it will ask if you would like to scan all the drives that are on your computer or narrow the search to just a single drive or a folder. After you have made the selection, click on the OK button. 64-bit java.
How To Use Windirstat To Clean Up Free
The program will then start the initial scan which might take some time depending upon your selection and hard disk space. For me it took around 6 minutes for a full scan of 750 GB hard drive. Once the initial scan is complete, the tool will display all the files in a tree structure along with the file extension graph which sums up the total amount of disk space used on the computer.
In the tree map, each block represents a file on your computer and the size of the block is directly proportional to the amount of space the file takes up on the hard drive when compared to other files. The partitions in the rectangle represent subdirectories and files. There’s an option to zoom in/out of the tree structure using the option available in the Treemap menu.
Using the tool I was able to find an old backup of my Android phone that was taking up around a GB on my computer, which I didn’t need.
The file can be deleted by using the option that’s available in the right-click context menu. You can also copy the path of the file to your clipboard or open Windows Explorer. While deleting the file there’s an option to either permanently delete it or send it to recycle bin for further review. There are some additional configuration options you can explore from Option—>Configure WinDirStat.
Conclusion
So that was how you can use WinDirStat to reclaim large amounts of disk space on your computer. Before I finish, I would like to recommend a similar app called WizTree which might appeal to some of you, who feel overwhelmed by the above tool. This one does not come with the graphic analysis feature but the scanning process is way better than the former.
Top Image Credits: William Hook
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