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hard-drive posts

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware, Windows x64

Space Sniffer is a drive space analyzer with a dash of eye candy


We've looked at ways to visualize your disk usage before with apps like WinDirStat, JDiskReport and Xinorbis. Space Sniffer offers the same functionality with a little bit of a twist.

Files and folders are displayed as boxes of various sizes which correspond to the file size. The color scheme is customizable, and Space Sniffer features subtle transition and hover effects. That doesn't make it function any better, of course, but a little eye candy never hurts - and it's always welcome on boring old utilities like a disk analyzer.

If you're overwelmed (or underwhelmed, for that matter) by the number of boxes presented, simply click the more/less detail buttons to adjust the display the way you want. A zoomed-out view lets you quickly locate large folders, while zooming in will give you a better feel for individual files. There's also a quick filter option to limit what's displayed in the main window.

Space Sniffer is also a great addition to your flash drive - it's totally portable and just under 900Kb in size.

[via Freeware Files]

Filed under: Utilities, Hardware, Windows, Commercial, Freeware, Windows x64

Get Easeus Partition Manager Pro free today only

Easeus Partition Manager is a great, free application for, well, managing hard drive partitions. I've written about it before, and I always keep the installer handy on my USB flash drive. Apart from creating, deleting, resizing, and formatting, you can also use Easeus to copy partitions or entire disks.

The free edition is great, but until 11:59pm today, you can get your hands the professional edtion for free as well, thanks to Easeus and MakeTechEasier. Professional Edition adds support for 64-bit Windows systems and the option to create a bootable CD or DVD.

Don't be too sad if you miss out - the free version runs just fine on 32-bit systems, and since EPM runs in Windows the lack of a boot CD won't be a problem unless something catastrophic occurs. I've used Easeus extensively and never had a single problem that wasn't my fault.

Head over to MTE for the download link and details.

Update: the site seems to be a tad overworked at present...be patient, and hopefully you'll get through soon!

Filed under: Internet, Utilities, Windows, Macintosh, Freeware, Windows x64

Analyze drive space usage on Windows or Mac with JDiskReport



There are plenty of free drive space analyzers out there - like WinDirStat, for example. If you like visuals that are a bit more subtle, give JDiskReport a try.

After the initial scan (which can take a minute or two on drives as cluttered and full as my C:), several reports are generated. You can view distribution by size, file type, and modification date, or browse a top 50 list to find your biggest space hogs quickly.

I did experience a momentary hang when switching to the ring chart in one particularly massive directory, but other than that the program worked very well. The standard pie chart, bar chart, and file views all worked without hanging.

It's freeware for Windows (x64 as well) and Mac, and is also available as a Java Web Start app.

[ via Life Rocks 2.0 ]

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware

Get detailed disk info with Drive Manager

Drive Manager
If you store all of your Windows files on a single hard drive with one partition and rarely use the CD/DVD drive or USB flash disks, then please ignore the rest of this article. If on the other hand you have multiple hard drives or partitions and are constantly using removable media, you may want to check out Drive Manager.

Drive Manager will provide you with detailed information about all disks connected to your computer at a glance. The utility comes in a single executable package, so all you need to do is click and run. No installation is required.

In addition to showing you information about the size, format, and name of any disks, you can also get SMART information, or detect file system flags. For optical disk drives you can detect the types of discs that the drive can read and write as well as the maximum write speeds. You can also analyze disks.

Drive Manager also lets you hide drives so that they won't show up in Windows Explorer.

[via gHacks]

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Productivity, Freeware

Automate your drive re-organizing with Download Mover

I've been writing about plenty of manual ways to keep your hard drive neat and clean recently. That's a nice start, but what about some automated help along the lines of Auto-Delete?

While Download Mover is no longer actively developed, it's still good at what it does. Download and extract the zip file and launch the executable, and DM will ask you where and what you want to monitor. Specify the interval for checks and set your notification options, and you're done.

You can specify multiple folders to watch and specify different targets for each file type you add. I often forget to change my Firefox download preferences to save things in my d:\downloads folder. Setting Download Mover to scrape .exe and .zip files into the proper directory keeps my desktop nice and tidy with no interference.

If you've got another automated tool for handling chores like this, please share it! I'm always on the lookout for another app that can tackle tedious tasks like directory cleanup.

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