Wicker’s Lemma to Moore’s law:
Every hard disk gets full, independent of its size.

Astonishing, but true. If When your hard disk gets full, you can do two things:

• Clean it up
• Buy a new one

Of course, when your harddisk gets full late saturday night and you need some more space now, buying a new one is not an option. Also, if the harddisk in your laptop gets full, buying a new one will come with a lot of work: Transferring all the data, programs and the OS to the new harddisk. This is not something you really want to do! So often cleaning up is the only option.

How do you clean it up? First, empty the trashcan. This may already be enough. If it isn’t, download WinDirStat for Windows (or KDirStat for Linux or Disc Inventory X for Mac), install and start it. It will scan your harddrives and create a nice looking view where you can see exactly what consumes the most space on your drive. Every file is represented by a rectangle and the size of the rectangle is proportional to the size of the file.

It is indeed enjoying to use this tool for hunting and killing those evil memory monsters. It may be more enjoying than killing pigs with birds 😉 Happy hunting!

WinDirStat is free software, GPL’ed.