Is your hard drive notoriously low on disk space? If it is filling up faster than you can delete files you may need some help to free up enough disk space to not be bothered by the low disk space warning for the next couple of weeks or even months.

While you could go large file hunting manually using Windows Explorer, we all know that this is not the best way of doing so as the default file manager is not displaying the overall size of a folder. A right-click and the selection of properties from the context menu does, but would you really want to do that for hundreds of folders? I’d guess not.

Enter Folder Size, a free portable software for Windows that displays all the relevant information that you need in its interface.

Once you have started the program you need to pick a hard drive at the top that you want to analyze disk space wise. It may take a couple of seconds before all information are displayed in the program. This mostly depends on the size of the hard drive and its performance.

Once done you see all of the drive’s root folders and their size on the left sidebar, and the folder structure of the selected folder on the right. The main pane lists folder names and sizes, files, and also the percentage of space they use, the number of files and folders stored within, and the creation, last modification and accessed dates.

Here are some tips to get started deleting large files and folders on your system.

• You may want to start with the uninstall a program control panel applet to uninstall files that you no longer need.
• Use CCleaner to remove temporary files first to free up disk space
• In Folder Size, go through the largest folders first but avoid the Windows folder. A good place to start is the My Documents folder which often is filled with downloads, documents and other files that you may no longer need.
• If you are not sure if the file is needed leave it in its position, or at least create a backup of it first before you remove it. You can for instance burn the files to DVD so that you can recover them at a later time if need be.

It may take some time to go through the files on your system but once you are done, you should have freed up enough disk space.