WinDirStat review: Free up disk space in your computer manually

Restore vanishing Hard Disk space on Windows

WinDirStat, weird name right? Not really, welcome to the nerds and geeks world - Windows Directory Statistics. Hi, readers... been a long time. Allow me to wish you the Happiest New Year 2019. Now back to our today's app/software review.
Restoring or getting space from your desktop or laptop's hard disk can be very stressful, especially and even if you have a bigger capacity internal storage you also need to take care of your machine. Be stressed no more, WinDirStat is probably the best free disk space analyzer tool you can find that can fully sort you out.

Related Post: How to free up space on your Android phone or Tablet

WinDirStat is a free and open-source graphical disk usage analyzer for Microsoft Windows or in simple terms, its a disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool for Windows Operating System. It is notable for presenting a sub-tree view with disk use percentage alongside a usage-sorted list of file extensions that is interactively integrated with a colorful graphical display (a treemap).

The software doesn't just show you what's occupying all the space—it also lets you set up cleanup commands and manually delete data, all from within the program.

WARNING: If you don't know what a file is for please inquire from an IT professional or a nerd to help you clean up space because you might delete a system file that might make your machine or Windows to malfunction.

How to use WinDirStat

Download links are below the review.

You can scan one, multiple, or all internal hard drives, flash drives, and external hard drives at once, or just one single folder.

The software's view is given in a known simple view like you would in File/Windows Explorer so that you can browse through folders and files easily, except that WinDirStat sorts the folders not by name or date but total size from the biggest to the smallest.

There's also a sortable file extension list that shows which file formats like MP4, EXE, RAR, etc. are taking up the most space. It includes a description of the file type, what percentage of the total available space that the format is using, and how many files of that type are on the drive/folder. Now that's cool right? ...and thats not all.

The extension list also serves as a key to understand the treemap, which is a visual representation of all the files on the drive and their respective proportional size to every other file (the files represented as larger blocks take up more disk space than the files shown as smaller blocks). If you'd want the colour to be arranged colour by colour then you have to defragment your drive(s) once in a while.

NOTE: Copying files into the hard disk, deleting files from the hard disk and copy pasting a file(s) from one position to another disorganizes your hard disk, defragment at least once every month and doing disk cleanup helps a lot especially in speed of the computer in accessing files.

Using WinDirStat for a long time and its good but one downside is the speed at which it takes to complete a scan especially if the hdd you are scanning is huge and when you close it you have to scan afresh to view the files again, so when you want to scan be ready to take your time. Upside, you can scan a single folder and it gets the job done.

Download WinDirStat 1.1.2

WnDirStat 1.1.2 Mirror Download

(FossHub)

There are several other disk space analyzing softwares/tools like Disk Savvy, Space Sniffer, GSmart Control and JDiskReport. Other softwares are TrueCrypt (though its a disk encrypting software it also analyses disk space), Disk Spaceup (a defragmenting tool app but also can show you your hdd usage space, OODefrag (my best defragmenting software, it also does disk space analysis).

Thank you for reading through, hope WinDirStat gets you the space you need. Feel free to comment below about the article or tell us about any other disk analyzing tool that you know of or ask a question below or via our email jtechpreneur@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook for more updates.

Until next time, PEACE.

Related Post: How to free up space on your Android phone or Tablet | Ways to cut down on data usage on Android Operating Systems