Free Disk Space by Finding Fat Files

Chris | Live Tech Support | Video Help | Add to iTunes

http://live.pirillo.com/ – There are many free utilities you can use to discover what files and directories are on your computer. By knowing this, you can then easily manage your disk space.

Let’s say you have an 80 GB hard drive, yet there is only 20 GB free. How can that be? Is that really right? Well… yes. It probably is. If you aren’t sure where your space has gone, you can use any one of a number of free programs to take a look.

For Windows use, I prefer SequoiaView. SequoiaView uses a visualization technique called cushion treemaps to provide you with a single picture of the entire contents of your hard drive. You can use it to locate those large files that you haven’t accessed in one year, or to quickly locate the largest picture files on your drive.

When I need to take a look at files and directories in OS X, I tend to use Disk Inventory X. This utility is for OS X 10.3 and later, and works much the same as SequoiaView.

There are many other free alternatives to both of these. We’ll save those for another video, though. Once you’ve chosen the right utility, you can then use it to manage your files and directories. Simply locate the ones you no longer use, and delete them. However, BE CAREFUL. Don’t delete things you are unsure of. If you delete a system file, or a file important to a program you still need, it can have disastrous results. Your best course of action is to take NO action on files you are unsure of, without checking into what they are first.

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