Large hard drives may be plentiful these days, but you can still face storage constraints. You could be coping with a small hard drive provided by your company. Or maybe you’re trying to squeeze some life out of an older hard drive that you aren’t ready to upgrade.
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Those splurging on today’s fast solid state drives (SSDs) are pleased with their performance, but must constantly worry about running out of disk space, as SSDs have a lower capacity than traditional drives.
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Bottom line: it’s still important to know how to recover some disk space, while retaining the applications that you need. Here’s a checklist of how to proceed.
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What’s Eating Your Drive?
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You cannot begin to know how to recover hard-drive space until you can get an overview of which files and folders are occupying the most space.
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Windows doesn’t give you any built-in tools for seeing, at a glance, just how large some folders are relative to others. Luckily, you can turn to the free FolderSize (http://sourceforge.net/projects/foldersize).
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Install this open source program and your Windows Explorer file manager will be enhanced with a folder size option in the file and folder display area. Just click on a drive, and right-click one of the column headings in the file pane (name, date modified, type, etc.).
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There, in the right-click menu, you’ll see a folder size option. Select it and a new folder size column appears. In it, Windows will calculate and display the total size of the folders on your hard drive. Double-click a folder to drill one level down, activate folder size, and you’ll see the sizes of the subfolders.
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You can use this tool to quickly hone in on disk-eating files and folders. Without it, you’re largely left guessing about where all of your disk space has gone. Once you’ve located the problem areas on your…