kepo-ing Zz85

The first PC I used had a 512MB hard drive. It wasn’t long before I had to do clean up when the disk was reaching its capacity.

More than 10 years later, having use over 10 hard disks with the capacity of 1000x before, I still face the problem of storage shortage. Perhaps it was my poor management skills that puts me in a spot of doing a serious cleanup job when free space is critical.

Back in DOS (and still application to the windows command line), the “dir” command is used for checking free and used space. In Linux/*nix, “df” and “du” are the priceless tools for disk usage. Moving to the present, Windows Vista provides bar chart like displays under My Computer showing the disk usage. Yet with these and Windows Live searching and indexing, I fail to visualise what is utilising my drive, where and what they are.

Here’s my favourite program from years ago (during windows 98 period iirc)- a delphi (pascal) written lightweight freeware called Scanner. Years later, with many other diskspace visualizing software listed on software directories and search engines, Scanner is usually no where at the top. Its still, however, as useful and preferred for me as it displays in an interactive circular pie chart, as oppose to many bar and block charts (concentric pie charts vs treemaps/voronoi), where you can “drill down/up” or “zoom in/out”.

The only other free tool with “donut” charts I’ve used is Overdrive with more statistical information. If you’re feeling geeky on this topic, lifehacker recommends a couple more software. And for more? Plenty at freeware directories.

So go ahead, graph and see visually what’s taking the space, and manage your drive the way you wouldn’t have notice.