Folder Size 1.9.5

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on July 05, 2011

Folder Size is a free Windows utility that scans your drives or folders and displays detailed information about the size of their contents so you can see where the disk space went. It displays the sizes of files and folders as well as their percentage of total disk size.

Folder Size uses a layout common to many such utilities, mostly because it's the most efficient design: toolbar, left-hand tree view, and main window. Folder Size displayed all our disk drives with their total size, space used, and free space listed below the tree view. We clicked on our C drive and then clicked the Scan arrow. The program took a few minutes to scan 40GB of files; when it finished, it displayed the file structure in the tree view with the selected directory displayed in the main view. This view displayed file names and sizes; percentage of the total in numbers and bar graphs; total files, folders, and subfolders; dates created, modified, and accessed; attributes; and even the file's owner in expandable, draggable, rotating headings. We could also customize which headings we wanted to display and quickly choose file sizes from bytes to gigabytes. Buttons let us easily navigate through our file directories. The Help file is fairly basic, but then so is the program. It's not designed to do tricks; it simply displays detailed file information quickly, which is a much more useful and frequently needed capability than it seems.

The space below the main window displays charts of the program's findings, but we had trouble with this feature, possibly because it requires Adobe Flash Player installed in Internet Explorer to work. We had Flash Player in IE, but it's not available for 64-bit IE, and the Flash installer seemed to balk at the difference. The screenshots show nice-looking charts that can be printed and exported. We'd like to see either less reliance on IE or greater compatibility in accessing Flash, but beyond that, Folder Size is quite a useful tool.

Publisher's Description

From MindGems:

Folder Size will analyze your hard drives and display the file and folder sizes so that you can easily check the distribution of your disk space. The application will display the sizes of the folders and files and also the percentage of the total disk size that they occupy. The neat report can be sorted in order to identify the largest folders and the largest files. You can easily figure out which files or folders have filled up your dive space as Folder Size will also scan the sizes of all the subfolders. The application can scan your entire hard drive in minutes due to its optimised scan algorithms. The progressive scan will let you continue the scan from the point of interruption. Besides scanning an entire hard drive Folder Size can also scan a single folder in order to save time.

What's new in this version: Version 1.9.5 fixed where Rare scan termination issue mostly on Win7 and font is changed to Tahoma as it is clearer and supports better ClearType.