At top left there’s a familiar-looking directory tree displaying all the folders and subfolders on your drive, now sorted from biggest to smallest by how much space they take up. This can take a few minutes, especially for a large drive, but it’s well worth the wait.
#What is windirstat d Pc
Its opening graphic display doesn’t impress, but once you’ve chosen one or more drives in your PC it will scan through all the files and present its results in three main graphic areas.
#What is windirstat d windows 10
It’s known to run from Windows 95, through Windows 98, ME, NT4 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8 and 8.1, and although the website doesn’t specifically mention Windows 10 there are plenty of people using it on this latest version, as well. Now at this point I reach for the free third-party utility WinDirStat ( ), which is described as a disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool for Windows. However, this didn’t really find much that CCleaner hadn’t already dealt with, so I had to explore somewhat more deeply than normal.
#What is windirstat d update
My next port of call was Windows’ own Disk Cleanup utility, which apart from the usual temporary files also searches for any Service Pack backup and Windows Update Cleanup files, lets you delete your most recent System Restore point (which CCleaner by default wisely ignores for system safety), and disposes of any Windows Error Reports. This can be a really useful function, but for a musician it can still occasionally feel like you’re searching for a needle in a haystack. CCleaner can also analyse your drives in a basic fashion so you can see what’s taking up most space - the output is a simple bar chart with different colours displaying the proportion of your chosen drive devoted to Pictures, Music, Documents, Video, and Other files. I ran this as usual, but it only found and then removed a few hundred megabytes of temporary files, mostly used by my browser. I still periodically use the freeware version of the CCleaner utility ( which not only removes a wide variety of temporary files from your drives, but can also scan for and remove issues in your Windows Registry, manage any System Restore points, as well as seeing what programs get run each time you PC starts up (sometimes sneakily added by developers whether you want them or not), and what plug-ins have been set to run each time your Internet browser is launched. The first thing to do in such a scenario is to run some sort of cleanup routine. Now it claimed to only have a miniscule 18MB available, insufficient to complete the task which is why my audio application had bombed out. I was a bit surprised, especially since when I started this task I still had 8GB available on my solid state drive. However, now that so many of us are relying on much smaller solid state drives to host Windows, it’s much easier to fill them up without really trying.įor instance, I recently ran into a ‘no drive space available’ error part way through a long and involved batch process, sample rate converting a huge collection of audio files.
It always makes sense to keep plenty of free disk space on your drives, to provide working space and buffers.