And then, one day i got that fun-filed message saying,”You have less than 200MB available space on your hard drive. Please free some space, or your computer will begin to die a slow, painful, bitter death.” I paraphrase, but it’s not a fun message to read. And it was a shock to me because I wasn’t downloading tens of gigabytes of stuff, so where did all the space go?
One quick download later, I figured it out. TreeSize, a great and simple application, is the solution to all your storage issues. There’s a free version and a paid version, but for the basic purposes of getting rid of all the cra… I mean junk, on your computer, the free version is great.
Once you download the software and run it. It automatically scans your whole hard drive (and any other attached drive you choose), and then sorts the folders by how much space they’re taking up. It searches through hidden files and folders, system folders, literally everything on your hard drive, to give you a complete look at the size of every folder.
TreeSize also tells you how much space is being taken up by each folder, and which subfolder is the largest one. It doesn’t isolate a particular file, as the tree in the free version just doesn’t go down that far. But once you get to the offending folder, it’s usually pretty easy to figure out.TreeSize can open a folder for you, or even delete it for you right from within the application. This is where the warning comes in: don’t delete things just because they take up tons of space. A quick Google/Bing for most folder names, particularly ones you don’t recognize, usually provides information on what a folder holds and whether or not you can afford to delete it.
The reason I love softwares like this is because most of the space on my hard drive isn’t devoted to music, or movies; it’s devoted to old system restores, leftover logs from applications that I don’t use anymore, and more useless files that happen to make their way onto my system. I don’t need them, I don’t notice they’re gone, and about ten minutes ago, I freed up over 16GB of space by deleting a few of them.TreeSize can make your computer run faster, free up space for more music, documents, and fun things, and avoid the disastrous slow-down and crash of your hard drive as it constantly spins, looking for massive files you don’t need anyway.
HappY SurfinG!!! (:
