FOLDER SIZE REPORTING

Now that Microsoft Vista has been officially released to manufacturing (and will be available broadly to consumers at the start of 2007), I would like to summarize our product compatibility findings.

Put simply, all Key Metric Software products are fully compatible with all editions of Microsoft Vista. We’ve thoroughly tested FolderSizes, Duplicate File Detective, and OfficeStatus. We did end up making some cosmetic tweaks to the client interface of OfficeStatus (our new staff in / out board software solution) version 1.5 for the benefit of Vista, but they were quite minor.

If you do happen to stumble across any compatibility issues that we may have missed, please be sure to let us know.

Now that Windows Vista is nearing public release, I’ve been spending a bit more time running compatibility tests with FolderSizes. My findings – FolderSizes works pretty much perfectly with the most recent Vista builds.

I’m actually testing with the RC1 build of Windows Vista Ultimate Edition. Not surprisingly, the default installation of Vista Ultimate chews up a lot of disk space. Running a FolderSizes file report against my C drive reveals a significant distribution of large files.

If I switch to the File Sizes detail view in the navigation tree and double-click the 3MB-1GB file size range, FolderSizes will automatically launch a search window that shows me exactly which files exist in that size range.

Apparently the Ultimate edition of Windows Vista installs quite a bit of sample media by default. I suspect that Vista’s deeper graphical capabilities will translate into greater disk space requirements regardless of which edition you install.

I will, of course, continue testing FolderSizes compatibility with Windows Vista right up to the final release of the product. And if you’re doing the same, please feel free to contact me directly should you find anything amiss.

Just wanted to note that the PDF version of the online help file has been upgraded, revised, and improved.

You can download it from: https://www.foldersizes.com/content/static/help/foldersizes.pdf.

BTW, the latest public release of FolderSizes (v3.5) also upgrades the online help file format to HTML Help, which provides numerous usability improvements.

We released version 3.5 of FolderSizes today. It features improved search and scan filtering capabilities (with new regular expression support), improved XML exporting (with a new XSLT transformation file included), revised online help (now in HTML Help format), and more.

To download the latest and/or review the full v3.5 release notes, please visit the FolderSizes download page.

Occasionally someone will email me and ask if FolderSizes is capable of finding and deleting empty folders from their system(s). The answer is a resounding “yes”, and it’s actually very simple.

Just select the file system path you wish to scan within FolderSizes (note that you can also enter a UNC network path into the Path box at the top of the screen) and allow file system scanning to complete. Next, click the Size column in the results list twice to cause it to sort ascending (smallest on top). That’s it – FolderSizes will show all the zero-length file system objects (including folders) at the top of the list.

Note that if you have zero-length folders nested multiple levels deep, then you should engage the Deep Subfolder Display Depth setting – in the main menu, select View | Subfolder Display Depth | Deep.

Once you’ve got a listing of the zero-length file system object, select the ones you don’t want any more, right click, and choose Delete Selected Items.