clear your hard drive of huge

Don’t you hate it how Windows doesn’t show the size of folders unless you right-click and choose properties. Well, that can take a long time if your looking through your whole hard drive, trying to find out what is taking up all that space.
TreeSize Free is a free, small program that shows you the biggest folders on your hard drive and then gives you easy access to viewing or deleting them. If you are planning on using the application a lot, then I would run the installer but if not, then just download the EXE and run.

If you are on Windows Vista, or Windows 7, then run the program as an Administrator. When you first open TreeSize Free, you are presented with a blank screen:

Goto “Scan” at the top and then choose the drive that you want to “review”. Almost instantly results start appearing for your drive and if you haven’t touched any of the settings, then the largest file/folder is at the top of the list. Included behind each folder is a yellow-to-orange bar which shows you visually how much of drive it is actually taking up. Hovering over a folder/file displays a detailed tooltip that shows more than enough information for the average power user!  Below is a quick screenshot of what it looked like after I scanned my Windows 7 machine.

When looking at a folder, you can click the “+” to expand the folder and see the largest files/folders in that folder. When you decided what files/folders to delete you can easily right click on them and choose delete, or if you know the program that the folder is associated to, then you can just go ahead and uninstall or change that program should you want more space. A good idea would be to remove more installed components and favor using the cd when running the program (this may not be supported by all installations).
If you want to delete a file from within the Program Files directory, you need to run the application as an Administrator. Also, I would NOT recomend deleting anything from the ‘Windows” folder.
Overall the program is very simple and yet very informative. If you plan on using the program a lot then I would install it, but if you are just planning on using it a couple of times (when needed) then the downloaded zip should be fine!

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