Help! My Hard Drive is Full! (and what to do about it)

February 27, 2009

My computer gave me a pop up window with a very discouraging message yesterday. If you’ve never experienced this particular one, trust me- YOU WILL. It’s just a matter of time.

The warning went something like this:

“Your C: drive is 97% full. And buddy, your entire life stops until you deal with this.”

(OK, I added that last part, but that’s how I felt.)

I knew I let my hard drive get a little sloppy, and it was time to start trimming the fat. But where to start? My iTunes music? Pictures of the kids? All these ebooks I download?

And more importantly, how do I find the BIG space hogs, so I’m not picking off one Word document at a time?

Luckily, I found the ULTIMATE headache saver-an amazing (and free) little tool called WinDirStat, which allows me to *visualize* my hard drive.

That’s right, if you can wrap your brain around this one, I can actually SEE my files displayed visually based on size. This makes it very obvious in a glance what’s taking up all my hard drive space- and makes it a cinch to delete it.

In my case, the culprits were the BLUE files, followed by the BURGUNDY ones. (see image below)

Those giant blue blocks are video files, when I was playing around with green screen video production.

And somewhat embarrassingly, the burgundy files are “24″ episodes I downloaded from iTunes. What can I say, I got hooked.

Here’s the real power of this: In about 60 seconds, I deleted TEN files and freed up over 50% of my hard drive! Wow.


Although the developers of WinDirStat didn’t receive any creativity awards for the name (Windows Directory Statistics=WinDirStat), they made up for this with an amazingly solid and helpful tool.

Not only is it a free download, it’s an absolute breeze to use. Just start it up, and it produces a colorful representation of the contents of your hard drive, which you can easily match up with specific files- and delete them on the spot!

Download WiDirStat HERE

And while I have no doubt my hard drive will eventually fill up again (Jack Bauer still needs to rid the world of a few more terrorists) I know I’ll be ready to clean things off without losing sleep.

Written by Dave · Filed Under Million Dollar Ideas, Online Tools 

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