Filelight alternatives for Windows

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).

Faced with similar situation in Linux, I would immediately fire up 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 Treemaps are more popular than radial representation. I did find treepie but it wasn't all that exciting. I then chanced upon WinDirStat and SequoiaView.

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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 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.

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4 Comments

  1. Peter
    Posted March 27th, 2008 at 8:57 pm | Permalink

    I’ve always liked JDiskReport – http://www.jgoodies.com freeware

  2. Posted March 27th, 2008 at 10:59 pm | Permalink

    *@peter*: Oh yeah, I’d completely forgotten about it! I had used JDiskReport several years back, I just didn’t think that JGoodies was still around :-) Thanks for the reminder!

  3. Gurjeet Singh
    Posted October 7th, 2008 at 6:56 pm | Permalink

    Awesome… I am trying Sequoia right now (no installation required… yay!)and within a minute I can npw see that my C:\ has been infested with various logfiles!!! (especially from VirtualBox).

    Am going to try WinRirStat a try too before I start cleaning up…

    PS: I googled for ‘filelight windows’ and you topped the results.

  4. Scott
    Posted January 22nd, 2009 at 8:06 am | Permalink

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