I am looking for two programs. One that will test the speed of my hard drive (it is getting slow) and one that will show me exactly what is using up the most hard drive space. What are some good ones?

if you're using windows, load up a copy of knoppix and use hdparm (benchmarking) and df / du (disk space).

I use a program called Scanner to do the drive space thing. It's excellent, but always really hard to find by Googling.

To find out which files are using up the most hard drive space, run this in a cmd window:

dir /a:-d /s /o:-s /b > c:\temp\dir.txt

It will create a file called dir.txt in your c:\temp directory and will list all files on your PC in size order, starting with the biggest. Just let it run for a couple of seconds and you'll have a list of all the biggest files on your disk.

I miss using DOS properly

Hmm, it appears that something called "pagefile.sys" is taking up the most room. I should just delete it. Oh, and those really large ntldr and ntdetect files are taking up a bit of space as well. They'll have to go That's a neat trick, though. I enjoy learning "new" DOS commands.

If you actually notice your hard disk getting slow, and you're not just talking about the usual hardware-becoming-obsolete feeling, maybe it's time you defragged? I just got around to doing it on my machine yesterday, and nearly all the space on my two disks was fragmented.

I will second the recommendation for "Scanner", that's a really excellent program when you need to cull files and you're looking for the worst offenders first.

I use "Folder Size" a shell extension for windows. The site seems to be down today so I have attached it here. As for testing drive speed I just use TotalCopy to see how fast the file transfers from one drive to another.

Another one I used to use was Treesize Pro.

It's not so common now but people always used to say "I've run out of space so I deleted some documents and stuff but it only gave me 20Mb more". Inevitably you'd find a 900Mb temp file using up all their space and they deleted a load of stuff for nothing.

The simplest method is to just search for all files over (say) 50 Mb and sort the list in descending order.

Gareth

I used Treesize Pro, but despite what I said the last time Bitt brought up Scanner, I now prefer his program to Treesize. It's faster and has a cleaner interface, and most importantly it's free and doesn't give an annoying purchase message.

I do wish that Scanner had some features that Treesize had, though. A shell extension for one. I could go to a directory I knew had large files, and right click and get an idea of what was taking up what space. Scanner is just an executable, though, which is nice and compact. I also wish it had a little more information on the items it graphically displays. The window is so small, and it would be very easy to make an option that could double the size of the display, and add helpful info like percentages right onto the pie chart. Lastly, it would be nice to have the option to order the files on the pie chart in size order as well.

Bah! You can keep your 32-bit WYSIWYG apps. I'm sticking with DOS

Every time I need to find it I just search the Off Topic forum for scanner, which produces fewer results

I sometimes manage to remember that it's distributed as scn2.zip and that helps.