How to view the total Windows folder size in Explorer

Posted on November 18, 2007 at 12:18 pm

Running out of disk space on your hard drive? Need to figure out which folders are taking up the most space? Previously, I had written about a useful program called TreeSize that you can use to quickly find the largest directories on any drive on your computer. However, it would have been really nice if you could simply see the size of a folder while browsing in Windows Explorer. Instead, only the size of files are shown in the Explorer interface.

Here’s what the normal Windows Explorer interface shows when in details view:

So if you want to figure out which folders are taking up a lot of space, you have to manually right-click on each one and choose Properties. That’s just plain tedious and annoying! Why not simply have Windows Explorer calculate the folder sizes for you and display then in the blank spaces above.

Folder Size does just that for us. Folder Size is a freeware Windows utility that adds a new column to the Details view in Windows Explorer. The new column not only shows the size of files, but also shows the size of folders. It also keeps track of which folders you view and scans them in the background so that you can see the complete size of all files within the folder.

Here are a couple of it’s major features:

No need to switch to another program to view folder sizes. Also, it shows up in Open and Save dialog boxes.
No scanning required before you start, folder sizes are displayed immediately. Large folders are scanned in the background while you browse.
Explorer will automatically update the folder sizes in real time

As of right now, the software works on Windows 2000 and Windows XP, but has not been throughly tested on Windows Vista. However, you can give it a shot and uninstall it if it doesn’t work.

Once installed, open Windows Explorer and choose any partition to see it in action. You should now see the complete folder sizes displayed:

The software also supports 64-bit machines, so that should make some people happy. There is also a Folder Size control panel where you can set options such as displaying in KB, MB, GB, or TB, etc. Enjoy! Source BrownBaron

[tags]folder size, windows folder size, show folder size, view folder size, xp folder size, calculate folder size, check folder size[/tags]

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Comments

4 Responses to “How to view the total Windows folder size in Explorer”

Brown Baron said on : November 18th, 2007 at 4:15 pm

Great post. Thanks for the mention!

Mark Schaub said on : January 21st, 2008 at 11:42 am

It’s not freeware – a nag displays “Please Register” instead of the folder size after about a week of use.

akishore said on : January 22nd, 2008 at 10:06 am

Mark – That’s not good! Well I didn’t realize that was the case. If so, check out another utility that I know is free called TreeSize, I wrote a post about it here:

http://www.online-tech-tips.co.....isk-space/

It will tell you the size of all folders and sort them automatically.

Sorry!