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.

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.