Find and delete unwanted files and folders

Here’s how to get started with Disk Analyzer and find what’s filling up your computer’s hard disk. Go to www.snipca.com/x134. When the website opens find the Free Disk Usage Analyzer heading and click the Download Now link underneath it. Ignore any security warnings and click Save and then choose a download location and click Save again.

Install Disk Analyzer by double-clicking on its icon, ignore any security warnings and click Run. Follow the instructions to install the program, read and accept the licence agreement and all of the defaults, then click Finish and after a moment the program will load. The number of disks displayed in the right-hand window will vary depending on how many are connected to the PC. In this example, Disk Analyzer has found our test computer’s main disk (C) a DVD drive and the network drive we are currently connected to. We are going to be working with disk C.

Disk Analyzer is arranged a bit like Windows Explorer. The various disks are displayed in tree form in the left-hand column and if we click on one of them, its contents will be displayed in the main right-hand window. Let’s try it. Click the disk C icon and see what happens. The main window shows the contents of the disk, ordered by size with the largest at the top. Looking left to right you can see the folder or file name, its size, and the percentage of the disk it is taking up. It is instantly easier to see what is taking up all the space.

It’s not wise to mess with the Windows folder but there is usually plenty of space to be saved elsewhere. Double-click on the Documents and Settings folder in the main window to open it and continue double-click on the relevant folders until the contents of the folder are visible. Here we can see the inside of our My Documents folder with the contents laid out as before in the main window and an additional pie chart at the bottom showing a useful folder-to-disk size comparison by percentage.

From this screen it looks as though the size of Downloads folder could be cut down, so we will double-click on that. Top of the list is the latest update for the AVG free program we use to protect against viruses. Since this is already safely installed and running we can click on it once to select it and then click the ‘x’ button in the toolbar. When the Confirm dialogue box opens, click Yes to move the file to the Windows Recycle Bin.

Navigate using the tree on the left or the browser-style back and forward buttons on the toolbar. In addition, check out the two bottom tabs that display the contents of the currently selected disk or folder either as a file list or a folder list, organised in order of size. It’s also worth checking out the Options dialogue box by clicking File and then selecting Options. From here, it’s easy to set minimum file sizes to display (and ignore all those tiny files) as well as telling Disk Analyzer to display only pictures or videos or music files.