By Don Patzsch, Tampa PC Users Group
Here is a real neat program. It comes on a single 3.5 inch disk. It is very simple to install, but it has many advantages. The one I like most is that the screen that resembles Windows Explorer has the size of the folder or the file right after the entry.
For example, C:\folder 900MB. Just below that is Windows 240MB Program Files 175MB and so on; each folder is listed and followed by the number of bytes or MB's it contains. After the folders come the files, again listed by the number of bytes in each entry. See the graphic below to get the view of the screen.
This sounds innocent at first, but think for a minute. If you had a listing of all the folders and files on your C: drive, starting at the top with the largest entry, you could quickly see where you could go to remove some unused or seldom used folders or files and thereby get that space you need for the latest and greatest program you want to add.
Now click on Windows and then FONTS and notice that your fonts are all listed with the largest entry first. You can run down and see all the fonts that your computer is loaded with, and right here you can save a lot of space by removing a few dozen fonts you never use. My FONTS folder has 21.1MB of FONTS and I use maybe four or five. This DiskMapper feature is worth having.
If you want to see the files you have installed but never used, simply click on "Never Used After Creation". The files or folders you have installed but never used are then highlighted. You can get an idea of how they are spread out on the disk representation, and also you can get an idea of how many such entries are on your hard disk.
Put the mouse cursor on any file and get a description of the file, its size, the date you entered it and the quantity at the bottom of the screen. Double click on the file, and it will come up in a viewer, your browser or a text editor, or whatever you have set up.
When DiskMapper comes up, the view (like Explorer) that you see is a color coded map. On the left is the familiar folder and file list similar to Explorer, on the right is a map consisting of rectangles; the size of each represents the relative size of the file or folder. You can easily see where the large files that take up the bulk of your disk space are.
If you bring up Windows Explorer, you can right click on any folder and access DiskMapper by clicking on DiskMapper. You can find duplicate files by simply clicking on the Duplicate File button. The duplicate files show up in colors on the graphic side of the DiskMapper screen. Click on one file and a line forms to the duplicate file. You can then easily see where they are located on the hard disk. Look at the black connecting lines on the graphic to see this.
In a similar fashion you can see all the .GIF (or any other extension) files on the graphic representation by clicking on the ext button. This is really a neat representation.
A special feature for users of Office 97 helps you see how much space Office 97 consumes and shows you which files are optional. You'll see how much space Office 97 takes up and see files classified into four types.
DiskMapper by Micro-Logic, $49.95 list price. http://www.miclog.com. Recommended. Street price will be much lower, I believe. u