WinDirStat Portable
WinDirStat Portable Overview
Visualizing the whole structure of your computer is not a hassle anymore because by using WinDirStat Portable, you can now conveniently view the entire content of your hard drive. This is very useful if you want to figure out what types of files taking up space of your hard drive. If you are using a computer running using Windows operating system, you may have understood how the operating system visualizes your hard drive structure. If you inspect the properties of a hard drive, you can find a pie chart with blue section representing occupied space and red section representing free space. WinDirStat does further than that because it not only visualizes the hard drive structure universally, but it also visualizes the hard drives’ directories and all files stored in those directories.
WinDirStat Features
WinDirStat visualizes the overall structure of your hard disk in the form of colored blocks structured as a treemap. Each folder stored in your hard drive will be represented by block with specific color and, according to its type, each file stored in that folder will too. Folders and files consuming larger space will be represented by blocks with bigger size. If you click a block, you can reveal the location of the folder or file represented by that block in your hard drive. Therefore, you can easily figure out which folder and which file consumes the most space of your hard drive. If you think that those large folders and files are unnecessary, you can delete them immediately.
In addition to visualizing the structure of your hard drive, this program also allows you to clean up your hard drive from unnecessary files. The clean-up function that this program provides is more advanced than the similar built in function with which your operating system is equipped because it allows you to specify which parts of your hard drive to be cleaned and which parts should remain intact. You thus don’t have to worry about accidental deletion of certain important file because of its advancement.
Pros
WinDirStat is a powerful disk management program which you can download freely from the internet. This is obviously the reason why using this program is highly recommended. The portable version of this program makes it possible for you to place it in your removable storage device and use it anywhere you want. This program also performs so fast that you can free 2 GBs of junk files in less than two minutes.
Cons
In spite of its power in managing hard drive’s space and keeping its space utilization efficient, this program has a slight flaw that it doesn’t warn you when you want to delete a file. There are also several users who report their preference of using other disk management programs instead of using this program.
Conclusion
As a free disk management program, WinDirStat can be matched in power and quality with other commercial and proprietary disk management programs. The visualization of hard drive structure using colored blocks is an innovation that is hardly found in other disk management programs. However, users’ circumspection is highly recommended when using this program because it doesn’t warn them when they delete files or folders. Although there are several users who say that this program is less powerful than other similar programs that are sold commercially, it is still considered unmatchable by other programs that are distributed freely and the portable feature of this program further makes it prevailing over its competitors.
