Show Disk Usage in Windows - and a little hack

One of my favourite Windows applications is WinDirStat, a great little utility that breaks down disk usage by file and folder and shows it using a treemap. The tree map is possibly the best way of displaying this kind of information, in addition to the obvious “block size is relative to the file size” you also get colour coded file types (you soon learn to spot clusters of mp3s…) and easy right click access to most of the functionality you’ll want to use while investigating disk hogs.

And now the little hack. The Show Usage registry file adds a “Show Usage…” right click option to all folders, if you invoke it then WinDirStat will start running from that point, saving you from opening the application, navigating to your current place in explorer and then running it.

Notes: If you’ve installed WinDirStat somewhere other than the default you’ll need to amend this file manually and set the path to the executable. Be warned. This is a registry file. Running it may eat your machine. If so I don’t want to know. It worked for me on a Windows 2003 eval install (don’t ask).