Tree Size and WinDirStat
I had a comment on my post Where Has All My Hard Drive Space Gone? from cgoren that recommended an alternative to WinDirStat called Tree Size (I'm only looking at the free version of Tree Size. There is a Pro version that has more functionality).
If you love the concept, but find that app overkill, check out TreeSize free edition at http://www.jam-software.com/freeware/index.shtml#treesize.
Its a nice, simple UI and, importantly, it installs itself in Explorer's context menu so you can right click on a subdirectory within explorer e.g. c:\documents and settings, and TreeSize launches and runs from that as its root directory.
I went and checked out Tree Size and just don't agree with the comment that WinDirStat is overkill and Tree Size is better (ok, it doesn't exactly say that Tree Size is better but it implies it (at least the way I read it)). The only thing that Tree Size might have going for it over WinDirStat is the installer will add Tree Size to your Explorer folder context menu (it does give you the option to not install it there as well which is a good thing). In fact, I think the only reason Tree Size has an installer is to create the shortcuts and context menu entries. Personally I'd rather not have an installer (although WinDirStat has one if you want it. You can also just get the binaries or even the source code). It only takes a few seconds to create a shortcut to the program under your SendTo menu and you have nearly the same functionality. With no installer the app can live in my Utils directory and migrates seamlessly to other machines via a simple copy. I often copy my entire Utils directory to new machines and I have all of my install-less (is that a word?(it is now)) utilities on the new machine.
What about the functionality? Tree Size only offers one of the three views of your drive that WinDirStat does. While this allows a smaller window to work with it greatly reduces the usefulness. The visual representation (and even broken down by file type) view is just too useful to not have. Scan a directory and point out the abnormally large files with Tree Size. Hard to do since Tree Size will show the size of the files in the directory, but not the individual files. Here is the Tree Size view of my Downloads directory:
Notice that the VMWare Workstation directory shows that it is 268 MB in size. What is does not show (and I can't figure how to get it to show) is that there are 3 separate files in that directory. Take a look at the WinDirStat view of the same directory:
Notice that it shows all 3 of the files in the tree and highlights them in white in the graph. I can probably delete the 2 old versions and free up 170 MB. I can't get Tree View to show me this level of detail.
How about performance? Tree Size scanned my C: drive in 63 seconds, WinDirStat did it in 56 seconds. Close enough to be even. While Tree Size is ok, I'll stick with the better WinDirStat.
Just for grins I put together a .reg file to show WinDirStat under Explorer context menu. Note: messing your registry can seriously muck up your computer. I've only tested this on one machine and present it as is and take no responsibility for it messing up your machine.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell\WinDirStat]
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell\WinDirStat\command]
@="\"C:\\Utils\\WinDirStat\\WinDirStat.exe\" \"%1\""
I'm sure there are some registry gurus who read this that can present a better version. I'd love to see it.