A couple of days ago, when I switched on my PC and opened My Computer I was presented with a bright red drive tile icon, indicating that it was running short of free disk space.
I was puzzled as I had only recently run CCleaner to collect unused files, old browser caches, un-required file settings and bin them all. I was sure that I had over 13 GB of free space.
TreeSize Free
I turned to TreeSize Free to help me identify what was taking up so much space. I first blogged about TreeSize Free in 2011 in a post called My top free Windows 7 add-ons.
Once installed, all you do is right-click a folder (or drive), select TreeSize Free from the context menu and after running for a moment the application will tell you how large that folder and all its sub-folders are.
This is what it looks like.
What I learned the other day was that four items were taking up the most space:
- Podcasts (14.8 GB)
- Amazon Music (5.3 GB)
- XAMPP Apache server (2.9 GB)
- Adobe CS4 applications (2.7 GB)
I deleted the podcasts and music—I keep the music I listen to on another drive, this is simply where I download them after purchase.
Then I uninstalled Adobe and XAMPP, and reinstalled them on a larger drive.
Now I have a much more healthy 36.0 GB of free drive space.
If you are in a similar situation, I thoroughly recommend TreeSize Free. As they say: if you don’t measure it, you can’t control it.