What is WinDirStat & How it Works
Windirstat is a free and open-source disk space analyzer for Microsoft Windows operating system. It can be used to scan disks and display their statistics in various forms, such as pie charts of allocation types, histograms of file sizes, bar charts of the number of files in different age groups.
WinDirStat is an application that enables users to find out the most used files and folders on their device.
WinDirStat is a professional application with many features. It can help you get rid of the headache of finding out where all the disk space has disappeared to and give you some useful hints on how to avoid it in future.
It can be used to examine the file system and provide detailed information about the disk space usage.
Windirstat has a rich feature set, and can be used not only as a normal application, but also as a command-line program and as a Windows service.
How it Works
The program will scan your hard drives and show you a detailed summary of what is taking up space on your hard drive in the form of a colored chart. Each file type (MP3, ZIP, EXE, JPEG, etc.) is assigned a color in a collage. of squares that are large or small depending on how much disk space that file type uses.
Once you have identified the memory hogs, you can use WinDirStat to permanently delete the files from the application.
How to install WinDirStat & Setup it
1. Download and install WinDirStat. Proceed with the recommended installation.
2. Start WinDirStat and select the drive you want to test. Click “OK” and give the program 5–10 minutes to scan your hard drive.
3. The summary screen is displayed.The top half lists files and folders sorted by file size. When you click on a folder or file, the corresponding color block below will be highlighted.
4. Or click on the big colored blocks to find out which files are taking up the most disk space.
5. Once you’ve identified the culprit, right-click on the file and select “Delete (to Trash)” for later deletion, or “Delete (no way to recover)” for permanent and irreversible deletion.
Key Feature of WinDirStat
Screen: The main function of WinDirStat is to allow users to view files/folders that are taking up too much disk space. An interesting feature is the ability to view the size of each directory on disk. To go further, you can view the space occupied by file types like mp3, zip, avi, etc.
Treemap: To better visualize the spaces used, WinDirStat displays the size of a file or directory in a treemap. It’s a simple map that allows the user to get a visual view of the size of each piece of data on the
hard drive.
Convenient: By using this tool, the user will know which file or directory will be deleted to free up disk space, which makes it very convenient. Also, the intuitive interface makes all actions easier.
What WinDirStat Required
OS: Windows 95 (IE5)
Windows 98 SE
Windows ME
Windows NT4 (SP5)
Windows 2000, Windows XP
Windows Vista
Windows 7, 8, 8.1, and 10.
Some WinDirStat tool
If you really need to discover wherein all your tough disk area has gone, a miles higher device to apply is a unfastened software program application known as WinDirStat.
As you could see withinside the determine below, WinDirStat to start with opens to an unassuming display that appears even much less beneficial than the Disk Cleanup device. However, this display is only a beginning point. WinDirStat gives a wealth of facts approximately your disk consumption. To get started, simply pick a drive, and click on OK.
It takes numerous mins for WinDirStat to parse a difficult disk, however whilst the technique is complete, it shows a display screen this is just like the only proven below.
This display screen is split into 3 sections. The phase withinside the top left enables you parent out which folders to your difficult disk comprise the maximum facts.
In my case, for instance, the primary folder this is indexed is ProgramData. This folder comprise greater facts than another folder on my difficult disk, as evidenced via way of means of the Subtree Percent column.
So, by using WinDirStat, I immediately found an application that is consuming a significant amount of disk space.
The phase within side the upper-proper nook of the interface breaks down your garage utilisation via way of means of facts type. In this case, the software is telling me that I even have 45GB really well worth of DLL documents mounted on my system, in addition to 21GB of DAT documents.
The colourful location at the lowest of the interface is a visualisation of your tough disk’s contents. Each rectangle represents a file, and documents are grouped collectively through folder. Hovering over any rectangle reasons the device to show the corresponding filename and location. As such, it will become very clean to inform which documents and which folders are ingesting the maximum disk space.
For example, you might have noticed the large pink rectangle in the previous figure. Hovering over this rectangle reveals that it corresponds to a 6GB ISO file containing the Visual Studio setup files. You can even click on a rectangle to be taken to the corresponding file’s location within the file system.
Get your space back
As you could see, WinDirStat gives a wealth of statistics approximately the contents of your tough disk. This statistics is organised in a manner that makes it smooth to discover massive documents and folders which can be ingesting extensive quantities of space.
Furthermore, the device additionally consists of a reporting engine in addition to included get entry to to the Windows command set off and to the recycle bin. More importantly, WinDirStat makes it a ways less complicated to reclaim extensive quantities of disk area than the Windows Disk Cleanup device typically does. With only some clicks, you could see precisely how your garage area is being used.
Other Things You Should Know About WinDirStat
1. Before you proceed with installing WinDirStat, here are more details that you might be interested in:
2. It helps nearly all Windows OS versions, from Windows ninety five to Windows 10/11.
3. You can experiment more than one or person tough drives.
4. You can experiment outside tough drives too.
5. You can readily browse thru documents and folders the identical manner as you’ll in Windows Explorer. The handiest distinction is that it types the folders via way of means of general size.
6. It permits you to fast replica the course of a record or folder.
7. It has a cleanup menu that gives a manner to get right of entry to documents and folders from in the tool.
8. It shows up to two million subitems in a listing. You can extrade the colours for each listing list in the tool’s settings. You can personalize the height, style, and brightness of the utility.
Pros and Cons of WinDirStat
There are many things that you’ll love about WinDirStat. But as with most software programs, it also has some downsides. We’ve listed them below:
Pros :
- It installs quickly.
2. It can support multiple file types of varying sizes.
3. You can freely choose what specific hard drive to scan. This is very useful if you have multiple drives on your PC.
4. It allows you to scan a single folder instead of the entire drive.
5. It allows you to easily delete files from a certain application folder.
Cons :
- It only works on Windows.
2. Scans often take time to complete.
Conclusion :
After all the discussion we conclude that WinDirStat is one of the best and usefull for the cleaning storage from the PC. And also it has great review and response from the users.
You can use WinDirStat on your microsoft Windows. It has very easy step to install and setup it.