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Eight Tips for a Faster Hard Drive

Steve Bass

Find Colossal Files on Your Hard Drive

Windirstat is a nifty tool that creates a graphical depiction of the contents of your hard drive; it's ideal for finding big files. Windirstat (available free) scans your drive and produces a treemap showing each file as a colored rectangle proportional to the file's size. In this screen capture, the big purple rectangle on the left filled with small rectangles is a slew of MP3 files; the green blob on the right signifies images. Click on a file name in the left panel to see where that file is on the color grid below. To jump to a file, select a large block on the color grid for it. Toolbar buttons let you zoom in on a cluster, copy a path, open the file, and more.

Contributing Editor Steve Bass writes the Tips & Tweaks blog and is the author of PC Annoyances, published by O'Reilly. Contact him at hasslefreepc@pcworld.com.

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