WinDirStat: Find Out What's Using Up Your Storage Space

Have you ever experience losing gigs of disk space on your hard drive even though you're not saving any files? Often times I've experienced this type of problem. I'm always wondering what's eating up my storage space. A friend of mine suggested a software an it's been helpful in determining what those files are. It's WinDirStat.

WinDirStat is a disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool for Windows. It is very light and easy to use. It shows disks, files, and directory sizes in a tree list and a graphical format. Below is a screenshot of the main window:

As you can see the lower part of the window shows what files are in your hard drive and how much it consumes your storage space. If you highlight a folder in the directory it highlights the contents of that folder in the tree map (the white border). It is also color coded so you can determine how much it consumes the disk space (the red square are Paint Shop Pro 5 files, the green ones are .dta files).

Let me share my experience and how this program helped me solve my storage problem. In the office I've been working on a lot of media files (audio and video) which are often raw and has very big file sizes. Every time I'm finished working on them I'll copy the raw files into an external storage and delete the large file in my PC. I noticed that even though I'm constantly cleaning up my storage free of these large files, after a couple of months my hard drive only has less than 2 gigs of space left. After a lot of cleaning up (deleting cached internet files, uninstalling unused software, etc.) I've managed to free around 15 gigs. After a couple of days I noticed that I'm constantly losing disk space (around a gig per day). This happens even though I always  remove raw files after working on them. After a couple of weeks I can't delete anymore files as they are all needed for my work. I only have less than 1 gig of storage left on my computer. I asked my fellow content guy and he said that he'd experienced the same thing also. He suggests that I use WinDirStat. After downloading it (it's only less than 1Mb in size), installing, and running it, I found out who the culprit are: they are .cfa and .pek files. I discovered after a little research that when you open media files on Premiere and SoundBooth, they create these files that are ridiculously large. after deleting these files (as I'm not using them and I'll never use them again, since I can just open the raw file and they'll just create those files again anyway) I've managed to free up around 70 gigs. At last my hard drive can breath easily again.

The download page for WinDirStat can be found here. It is completely free. Other infos about the program can be found here. And oh, a direct download link for the program is here. I strongly support open sourced programs over c'd software. I recommend you do also.

Please try WinDirStat for yourself and tell us what uses up your disk space the most!

EditPad Lite: A Fast, Free, and Powerful Text Editor

Greetings! This is my second post on computer applications that helped me a lot at work. It’s a program that I use also at home and I think this is a must-have for every Windows computer.

Have you ever felt a need for a text editor that is much more powerful than Notepad, but much less complicated than MS Word or OpenOffice Writer? Well, I do. Sometimes I have to take notes but Notepad is just too weak and it’s a huge hassle to open Word or Writer. EditPad Lite solves that problem. It has an easy-to-use interface that you can customize to suit your text editing needs. It has a multi-tab feature that lets you open many tabs at the same time. You can also customize the color of your editor to whatever color you feel comfortable at. Other features are available at their website (Click here to read about all of the features from the EditPad website).

For me, their best features are:

• Multiple tabs
• Customizable colors
• It’s ability to minimize to system tray so it’s doesn’t add to the taskbar clutter
• It’s ability to stay on top of other windows (it makes it easy to copy text from a scanned document jpg and other tasks that need to have the text editor on top all the time)
• The Convert menu (lets you convert the text to various formats, may it be lower or upper case of even the text encoding)

EditPad Lite is a free software for personal use, so go ahead and try it out (it’s only 3.5MB). They have a Pro version that has more features than the free version, It boasts a very powerful text editor that allows you to edit every text file you have with ease. If you’re a programmer, you can configure it to activate certain coding features for that code, much like Notepad++ (a favorite among programmers but it’s not advisable for your everyday text-editing needs). It also has added options in the Convert menu (It can convert line breaks to spaces!). It also has a built-in spell checker!

There’s a saying that the best things in life are free. And EditPad Lite is one of those best things. I highly recommend you check it out. Oh, it’s only available in Windows.

Scrolling Desktops: Extend Your Computer’s Workspace

Greetings! This is my second post and I will write about free softwares that I use at work to make my life easier. I’ll start with scrolling desktop application.
Scrolling desktop is a kind of virtual desktop application that allows you to scroll the screen left and right giving you a much wider workspace compare to the usual fixed desktop. A scrolling desktop is also an anomaly in which your screen resolution is larger that what the monitor can display. Since the whole screen does not fit in the display, you need to scroll left or right or up or down to view the whole contents of the desktop. This can be annoying but some programmers found a way to use this to extend the desktop space. This enables you to have multiple windows maximized and without having to pres alt+tab to switch between windows. I have tried two free scrolling desktop applications: 360desktop and GiMeSpace Desktop Extender.

360desktop

At work, I have to use 4 different applications at the same time. To make matters worse, I need to be able to see what’s in 2 applications at the same time. This problem can be easily solved by using two monitors but working in a startup company denies me with that luxury. Since I was grew up believing that everything can be found on the Internet, I researched some cost-effective solutions. 360desktop is the first application I found.
360desktop is a free download that transforms your Windows desktop into a 360° panoramic workspace. While all Windows functions operate normally, with 360desktop you can pan your desktop through 360°, giving you almost unlimited desktop space, with more room for all your open applications, browsers, windows, widgets and more.
Now you can personalize your supersized workspace with your favorite online and offline content - widgets, web pages, RSS feeds, slideshows, videos, all delivered into a stunning 360° photo background.
Here’s the demo to explain to you more about 360desktop (Since he’s the founder and CEO, he knows more than I do about this product.)

I used this application for around 2 months or so. And throughout that period I noticed many issues. Some of its disadvantage are:

• You cannot use your own background image.
• It takes time to load the application.
• It does not fully support multiple desktop manager applications.
• It shows annoying ads when you click in the navigator a couple of times.
• You don’t really have unlimited desktop space. You can only have around less than 10 windows maximized to consume the whole panoramic desktop.
• You cannot use your own background image.

There may be a a lot of changes in the program by now you, can just check out their website and try for yourself. I stopped using this program after I discovered a much simpler scrolling desktop application: The GiMeSpace Desktop Extender.

GiMeSpace Desktop Extender

After trying out 360desktop, I found it very complicated and I need a software that just does what I need and nothing else. I researched about virtual desktops at Wikipedia and found an article there about scrolling desktop. There I discovered GimeSpace. It’s a light,simple, and very useful program and it’s just what I need. It’s trial version has limited functionality but it works just fine. I allows me to have a very, very wide scrolling desktop. I haven’t tested how many windows I can fit horizontally but believe me, it’s WIDE!. It allows you to scroll the desktop by moving the mouse at the edge of the screen left or right or you can toggle scroll lock on and lock the desktop and scroll it by pressing ctrl+alt or shift+ctrl then move the mouse left or right.
Oh, I just recently discovered that there is a free version and there’s a trial version. The free version just allows you scroll you desktop left and right and the trial version has a menu with some of the functionality of the full version. I’ll walk you through the different tabs of the trial version.

This is the navigation tab. I serves as the ‘viewfinder’ of your scrolling desktop. The small red box shows where your screen are and the small gibberish blacks are the windows. As you can see there a lot of space on the left and right to place you windows.

This is the Options tab. As you can see there are a lot of options that are disabled (the only ones that you can click are Repaint windows after scrolling and Show navigation icon for pen & touch screen computers.)

This is the Scrolling Windows tab. It shows the tasks that are running and here you can choose which windows are ‘fixed’ and will not scroll even if you scroll the desktop.
You basically can’t do anything on the “Help”, “Virtual Screen” and “Registration” tabs. Help just shows you the functionality of the program, “Virtual Screen” teaches you how to extend you desktop so that you can also scroll up and down. And “Registration” tab is well, the tab where you register so that you can fully use the program and all its features. And BTW, when you use the trial version, it annoys you about every 30 minutes if you want to register the product (I don’t really mind that).
So,  that’s it! Scrolling desktops are very useful applications especially of you are multitasking. Give it a try guys and tell me what you think. And oh, if you know better ones, feel free to share it here!