Tag Archives: WinDirStat
A visual representation of your files
If you look at the header image of this post, that is the result of me running an analysis on my hard drive using a program called WinDirStat. It’ a free download and anyone can use it. Just download, install, and run! Run the program, I mean. It uses a nostalgic animation of pac-men while it’s analyzing your drive, which takes a minute or so.
Pacmen doing their thing during drive analysis
Anyway, it’s quite nifty in the way it represents files and their sizes. For example, that huge red block on the right is hiberfile.sys, which is the file written to the hard drive when your machines goes into hibernate. When that happens, the entire state of your machine is written to the hard drive in that single hiberfile.sys file, and for all intents and purposes shuts down into an almost no-power state. That’s different from the machine being put to sleep in which the contents of your machine and user state are saved to RAM, which allows for it to come back to life very quickly.
