WHAT’S ON MY DRIVE?

There is (usually) no good reason to keep your main drive full of massive files. While the performance benefits only really start to show when you clear off a nighcompletely full drive, we’ve already discussed the fact that your main drive is not a trash can. You really should clean that thing up. To find the biggest files, a visual tool is a far better choice than a manual deep dive; while we’d have once recommended WinDirStat ( http:// windirstat.net)— and, honestly, it’s still an awesome tool—we’ve recently come across WizTree ( http://antibodysoftware.com), which is an astonishingly fast way of doing the exact same thing, and the best way to scan your drive to see precisely what’s taking up all that space.

Run it, select a drive, and you’re given a whole swathe of stats in the top two panels, and a colored map in the lower one, with bigger squares representing larger files, and each color and shading gradient grouping those files together in their constituent folders. Scan your mouse over the colored map to see details on those files; right-clicking gives you a context menu with the option to head to the folder to see what’s up, or do all the things you’d normally do in a Windows Explorer right-click context menu, down to deleting those files right there and then. Pay special attention to the top-right pane, as it can offer some insight about the kind of files that are the biggest menace; if you’ve been going Linux distro happy, for example, and happen to have a drive full of enormous ISO files, you’ll be able to quickly expand the tree to chip away at them—their actual location on the drive doesn’t matter at all.