Clearing the Junk Off Of Your Hard Drive (in 60 seconds flat)


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 BURGANDY ones.  (see image below)

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

And somewhat embarassingly, the burgandy 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 burn a lot of creativity naming it (Windows Directory Statistics), 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 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.