Find out whats taking up space on your computer

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Over the years I have used many different programs to look at hard drives in order to see what is taking up all the room. Some applications are great in that they display the information graphically. But the absolute best app I've used for this purpose is also FREE. WinDirStat (for win xp/vista/7) is available in an installer and as a portable application (I love portable applications).

One of the best things about WinDirStat is that not only does it display the make up of your hard drive in graphical and tree format, as well as providing you the option to display free space, it also color codes it and let's you click on anything and delete the file(s)/folder(s) by pressing the delete key.

Recently my 1TB backup drive gave me an error that it was full. I ran WinDirStat on it and found at least 10 occurrences of the same outdated 1gb file. I also found there was some old recycler files from a previous computer, another 9gb freed. By the time I was finished I had freed up over 600gb! Not bad for 30 minutes work.

What's even more amazing is you can run this app over a network. So I periodically use it to clean up my network shares. Because it's portable there is no installation and I can run it on virtually any windows box I come to.

I highly recommend this software to everyone who uses a windows computer.

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A free tool with a small footprint that gets a lot of use

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I've collected many small utilities over the years and some have come in very handy. One I use on a regular basis is VirtuaWin, a utility to create virtual desktops/windows. It is available in portable format (can be run from a stick) at http://www.portablefreeware.com/index.php?q=virtuawin&m=Search and the homepage is at http://virtuawin.sourceforge.net/.

I have this as a startup item. Since I have 2 monitors I set this to have 2 rows by 2 cols which gives me 4 virtual windows * 2 monitors = 8 virtual desktops. I can then switch between multiple applications with a swift hotkey combo (the hotkey default configuration differs depending on the operating system - when I installed it on XP the hotkey is windows key + arrow key, while on a windows 7 laptop the hotkey was ctrl+alt+arrow).

This allows me to have many applications running at once and I can see them all in full screen view. For instance I have a different window open for gmail, blogspot, Seesmic Desktop for Windows, The publications Database I do upkeep on, my experts-exchange account, Adobe flash, a graphics app. Then I have various smaller apps open but minimized.

The increase in productivity is fantastic and I have found this is an application I can't do without. The icon sits in the system tray and either the hotkey combo switches screens or clicking on the icon and choosing the screen you wish to go to does the same, but lets you skip through the screens more quickly.

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