I was recently running Windows on my dual-boot laptop and realized that I was all but out of disk space. Now, granted that this is not a particularly monstrous partition, but I was still surprised that the 30 gigs was so close to exhaustion despite that the fact that I don’t have a lot of media (music, videos) or that many heavy applications (perhaps the biggest is Office).

[[http://www.methylblue.com/filelight/images/filelight-1.0.png|{{ http://www.methylblue.com/filelight/images/filelight-1.0.png?200x200}}]]

Faced with similar situation in Linux, I would immediately fire up [[http://www.methylblue.com/filelight/|Filelight]], an excellent utility that “creates an interactive map of concentric, segmented rings that help visualise disk usage on your computer.” So I went looking around for similar alternatives for Windows.

In the Windows world, it seems that [[wp>Treemap]]s are more popular than radial representation. I did find [[http://treepieblog.blogspot.com/|treepie]] but it wasn’t all that exciting. I then chanced upon [[http://windirstat.info/|WinDirStat]] and [[http://w3.win.tue.nl/nl/onderzoek/onderzoek_informatica/visualization/sequoiaview//|SequoiaView]].

[[http://floatingsun.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/sequoiaview_-_c-03272008-063441pm.jpg|{{ http://floatingsun.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/sequoiaview_-_c-03272008-063441pm.thumbnail.jpg}}]]

[[http://floatingsun.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/c_-_windirstat-03272008-063434pm.jpg|{{ http://floatingsun.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/c_-_windirstat-03272008-063434pm.thumbnail.jpg}}]]

Both the tools are extremely similar in functionality (and even visuals). SequoiaView seems to be an effort out of the University of Technology at Eindhoven (Netherlands). WinDirStat is almost a direct port (in features and user interface) of [[http://kdirstat.sourceforge.net/|KDirStat]]. In my limited testing, I found SequoiaView to be faster than WinDirStat, but WinDirStat had a better experience overall.

Thanks to these tools, I was quickly able to locate and eliminate the bloat.