WinDirStat

I've been trying to figure out why my Windows installations are so bloated and I ran into this superb little app called WinDirStat. I'd never seen it mentioned here so I thought I'd share it.

http://windirstat.info/

It's pretty self explanatory and will show you, on one screen, where all of your drive space is being utilized. I figured out that two files named hiberfil.sys and pagefil.sys were taking up 20% of my media centers 60GB SSD, and those were easy fixes. The hiberfil.sys file was like 8GB as is used for the hibernate function. :wacko:

Anyhow, it's pretty useful. :)

You went through all of that trouble just to find out hibernate takes up a lot of space? Hibernate is one of the first things I disable on a new install. I also suspect you could probably consolidate your system restore to the most recent point. Those can eat up GBs as well (I've seen it go into double digits).

As far as the prog goes, I will have to check it out as a potential time saver for unpaid service calls.

hiberfil has a size matching the amount of RAM you have installed. pagefile is usually a system managed size unless you've set the figures manually. Hibernation can be disabled if you don't use it. Completely disabling the paging file is often not recommended due to how Windows manages memory, although with eight gigs and a SSD drive it may become less of an issue.

JDiskReport is another, Java-based program I've used for this task in the past, where I had more limited disk space.

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Originally Posted by mjmacky

You went through all of that trouble just to find out hibernate takes up a lot of space? Hibernate is one of the first things I disable on a new install.

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I used to disable hibernation too, until I discovered what an awesome feature it is. Resuming my work with everything exactly as I left it the day before, very useful for me. :yup:

I do turn system restore off, however. ERUNT can cover registry backups, and a third-party backup tool like Ghost will usually be more effective.

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Originally Posted by anon

I do turn system restore off, however. ERUNT can cover registry backups, and a third-party backup tool like Ghost will usually be more effective.

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I use Macrium for full backups. I only started leaving system restore on for the off chance that a driver update sneak in and fuck up my video/harddisk management (happened before). That and any other pesky updates.

I prefer Diskspacefan.

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Originally Posted by Darth Rings

I prefer Diskspacefan.

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The 1st 4 out of 5 times I read it, I swore I thought you were saying Dickspacefan. I kept trying to figure out what dick space was.

Edit: So, twat's the answer?

Thanks for the tip. I used to use an old (keygenned) copy of Tree Size professional, so it's always nice to see an opensource alternative. Lately I've been lazy and just do a search with a file-size filter, which finds all the big files, but not the folders stuffed with many small files.

i like spacemonger, the only other thing i did besides what skiz said was move the search location to a larger disk, thx btw.

I was using spacemonger too, but this one is pretty useful too. Good share.

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Originally Posted by anon

hiberfil has a size matching the amount of RAM you have installed. pagefile is usually a system managed size unless you've set the figures manually. Hibernation can be disabled if you don't use it. Completely disabling the paging file is often not recommended due to how Windows manages memory, although with eight gigs and a SSD drive it may become less of an issue.

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You've got that backwards. pagefile.sys is the same size as your RAM.

As I said, it's a system-defined size if you haven't changed that.

I forgot that on Windows 7, the hibernation file is compressed to 75% of its usual size, hence it does look like I mixed them up...

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Originally Posted by Skiz

Quote:

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Originally Posted by anon

hiberfil has a size matching the amount of RAM you have installed. pagefile is usually a system managed size unless you've set the figures manually. Hibernation can be disabled if you don't use it. Completely disabling the paging file is often not recommended due to how Windows manages memory, although with eight gigs and a SSD drive it may become less of an issue.

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You've got that backwards. pagefile.sys is the same size as your RAM.

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Anon is correct -- at least as Windows XP goes, which recommends a computer's pagefile.sys size (if manually set) to be 150% the amount of RAM, and hyberfil.sys being 100% of RAM size. (Vista/7 could be quite different though.)

I've never understood the reasons for some of these Windows default settings, let alone agreed with them. Like Win9x/XP's default pagefile setting being a dynamic size, as this can greatly increase disk fragmentation (and hence slow down performance) on a nearly-full hard drive. Another counter-intuitive situation is the fact that disabling the page file can cause problems, regardless of how much ram the pc has. (considering that MS DOS did not require a page file - or even support one originally)

But since the wise sages of Microsoft (perhaps moonlighting as virus developers?) decided that people are better off if they do NOT know a file's extension, these other odd default-setting decisions by comparison seem minor.