I love writing these articles and hope that you all benefit from the small tips here. If you do have comments, questions or feedback for the Geek, you can drop me an email at thegeek@netpro-cambodia.com.
In this month’s article, I would like to talk about how a small little tool can help you have full control of your computer hard drive’s free space. It’s called WinDirStat. The program is one of the Open Source family and is free, of course. Have you ever wondered what kind of data is occupying most of the free space on your computer? How about statistics of the file server at your office? Besides virus and hardware issues, the computer will run slower when there is not enough free space on the local hard drive. Microsoft recommends a hard drive partition should have at least 15% free space. I have met a few people that would like to keep their computer files organized by many partitions on a single hard drive There is a downside to this and I would recommend 2 partitions only, one partition for the system and another for personal data storage. For example, a laptop that has 360GB hard drive should have 2 partitions of approximately 180GB each.
WinDirStat is compatible in all of Microsoft Windows OS. This GUI (Graphic User Interface) tool is downloadable from windirstat.info. When you first run it, the program will analyze any selected hard drive partition for you so you can go make a coffee or enjoy reading AsiaLIFE while it does its thing. In just a few minutes, the program will present you with all files color coded and size oriented ordered so you can browse through to see what is what. You can even delete files on the spot. Note: Be extra careful not to delete files that you are not sure of. You don’t want to delete any compulsory system files. You can always check the file name or file extension on http://fileinfo.net for details before making any deletions. I hope this program works for you!
