Freeware Picks from FVCS

We do a lot of data recovery and many times we’re told “there’s not much on the drive” and we proceed to pull 60 gigabytes or more! Windirstat is a wonderful utility that scans your entire drive and shows you where the space is going.

Generally, you will find that those pictures and videos are taking up a lot of space and invariably poorly written programs are leaving temporary droppings all over the place.

There are a number of programs that will tell you where, but WinDirStat is the best at helping you remove the unnecessary files.

Here’s our normal procedure:

1. Set a restore point – very important.
2. Run CrapCleaner and possibly Cleanup! to remove the junk files.
3. Run WindirStat and then see where the space is going.
4. Clean out the unnecessary files.
5. Defrag

Here’s the official feature table:

• The directory list, which resembles the tree view of the Windows Explorer but is sorted by file/subtree size,
• The treemap, which shows the whole contents of the directory tree straight away,
• The extension list, which serves as a legend and shows statistics about the file types.
• Coupling. Select an item in the directory list: The treemap highlights it; and vice versa.
• Zooming.
• Built-in cleanup actions including Open, Show Properties, Delete.
• User-defined cleanups (command line based).
• Works with network drives and UNC paths.
• ‘Create disk usage report’ option.
• ‘Submit bug report/Feedback’ option.
• Online help.
• setup.exe.
• Language can be set to Czech, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, German, English, Spanish, French, Hungarian, Italian, Polish and Russian.

Stuff you MUST know: The programs we describe are ones we use or have used and found them to be effective. Many of these are very powerful and could totally hose your computer!!

Obviously we would never, knowingly, suggest a faulty program, but there’s always that possibility. Just as there is a possibility of a virus or spyware lurking inside. Very honestly, I find the free stuff better, on average, than the commercial products, but everyone has to decide for themselves.

Just so everyone understands – many of these programs have the power to TOTALLY hose your system and we take NO responsibility for that!!