It seems great that you could go out and pick up a tiny netbook capable of browsing the web for around $300 today, however many of these inexpensive new netbooks offer only a small amount of storage. For instance, the new Inspiron Mini 9 can only be equipped (from the factory) with up to 16GB of storage. With such little space available to us, it is important to keep data organized and make the most of the space you have.
I have personally been using a Vaio UX180 UMPC as my primary computer for the last two years. Of the total 30GB that are actually contained with the HDD, only 21GB is available to me (because of the recovery partition), I occasionally do a fresh wipe of the UMPC to keep it running optimally, but right now I’m bumping up against the wall at the end of my storage space.
Enter WinDirStat: a wonderful little program that will help you to visualize the data distribution of different files and folders on your drive(s). Using WinDirStat over the last week, I was able to browse around all the folders on my computer and see what was really taking up all my space. I was surprised at some of the things I found, and I quickly realized that there was quite a bit of data that I could delete to make room for more important things. I wanted to share this program with you readers because those of you following this site are likely to have a mobile device such as a UMPC or netbook that has limited storage. This powerful and free application can be a very useful tool for any computer.
Take a look at this screenshot below (click to view full size). WinDirStat takes a moment to analyze your drive, then breaks down every file and folder on the computer. It even color codes different files so you can see which types are clustered together. Highlighting a folder in the file hierarchy list will outline the contents of that folder in the visual area. Expand that folder and highlight individual files and watch them be located within the file group. Its actually rather neat to see, and you can even zoom in to see those super small files. (the blue files that represent the majority of the space in the screenshot below are all part of my music library).
