Reclaim Your Hard Drive Space the Easy Way

How many times have you run out of space on your C: drive and wondered… where did all my free space go? If you are tech savvy you’ll probably open up your CCleaner shortcut and clean out the temp files, but where has the rest gone?

The answer is a great little freeware utility called DriveSpacio that helps you find out where all that free space has gone, similar to the more well known WinDirStat (Download from Ninite) utility. The benefit of using this one is that it integrates directly into the Explorer shell and has a lot more reports.

Using DriveSpacio

Once you’ve downloaded and opened the utility, you’ll see a screen with the hard drives in your computer. For instance, if you look in my Computer dialog, you’ll see 3 hard drives and some other USB drives.

reclaim-your-hard-drive-space-the-easy-way photo 1

So the Drives tab in DriveSpacio will show you a graphical view of all drives on your computer, with all sorts of great charts and graphs.

reclaim-your-hard-drive-space-the-easy-way photo 2

Different views are offered, such as pie charts or the bar graph view seen below:

reclaim-your-hard-drive-space-the-easy-way photo 3

DriveSpacio integrates into Windows Explorer so you are able to right click on a drive and analyze it. You can also launch the application and open a specific drive, or even just a specific sub-folder if you want. I find this to be helpful because I can choose to only look in my user folder.

reclaim-your-hard-drive-space-the-easy-way photo 4 reclaim-your-hard-drive-space-the-easy-way photo 5

After scanning you really get a nice chart of the folders and files on the drive and exactly how much space they are taking up.

reclaim-your-hard-drive-space-the-easy-way photo 6

The interface has an explorer type feel and you can go through each folder and directory to get statistics, and the graph on the right-hand pane will change based on where in the tree you are.

reclaim-your-hard-drive-space-the-easy-way photo 7

You can also right-click on anything and choose to delete it right from the DriveSpacio window.

reclaim-your-hard-drive-space-the-easy-way photo 8

The Folders tab gives a great in-depth look at what folders are hogging space. You can toggle between either a bar graph or a pie chart, and choose to alternate between showing Kilobytes, Megabytes, or Gigabytes.

reclaim-your-hard-drive-space-the-easy-way photo 9

Another benefit of using this application is that there’s a portable version that doesn’t require any installation. Very useful for adding to your portable USB flash toolkit.

Download DriveSpacio for Windows

More stories

Use Parental Controls To Limit Time Kids Spend On The Computer

Parents are always looking for ways to keep their kids safe.  Windows Vista has added a cool feature called Parental Controls which are very easy to use which help when it comes to computers and the Internet.  About a year ago I covered how to use the controls to filter unfavorable Websites.

Convert An Excel Spreadsheet To A Tab Delimited Text File

When it comes to the business world and office documents, there are tons of file formats, extensions, and associations to be considered.  When Adobe came out with the PDF format it was to be the “standard” and even that can be sometimes be difficult when dealing with conversion for different tasks

Mysticgeek’s Week Review

We had a very some very exciting days this week and covered a lot of great content.  I am making a few tweaks and changes to my blog.  Most notably you can now sign up for an email subscription to receive my daily articles.

Friday Fun With Muxtape

You made it through another week (you did right?) well even if your Friday is annoying you, I have a cool site you can dabble with to take the edge off.  Muxtape is a cool site that takes the “old school” era of sharing dubbed tapes into the digital music realm.  This site is not flashy or fancy …

Turn A Gamepad Into A Midi Controller To Use With Audio Software

As a home musician typically you’re going to have programs such as Fruity Loops or other VST (Virtual Studio Technology) instruments within your favorite DAW (Digital Audio Workstation).  If you are on a budget these programs are expensive enough, let alone purchasing the hardware.  A common device

Create a Shortcut to the Stored User Names and Passwords Dialog in Windows

If you’ve ever saved a password when connecting to a website that requires authentication, for a remote desktop session or a mapped drive, you might have wondered where those passwords are saved. If you are a long time reader, you already know where, but you might be interested in how to create a

Create Your Own Simple iGoogle Gadget

You do not need to be a super programmer to create gadgets for you and your friend’s iGoogle page.  Now this method is not going to create any flashy games or show stock reports, but it is a fun way to share content with friends and family.  If you have not yet created an iGoogle page it is very

Backup Data Using 2BrightSparks SyncBack – (Part 1)

The number one rule which is drilled into your brain as an IT professional is “Backup Your Data!”  As part of a theme in the coming weeks The Geek and I are going over several different processes to backup data on your PC.  In a recent Lifehacker poll readers were asked what is the best Windows