WinDirStat Blog

Regarding the topic that is being asked for most often. Use the following approaches:

• Run a file system check on the file system (read: drive/partition) in question. E.g. chkdsk /f X:. You’ll have to have admin privileges and if this is the system partition you will have to reboot.
• Check whether you have System Restore Points (SRPs) enabled. If so, check whether the size reported for is below or equal to the amount you allowed for SRPs. If it is bigger and you skipped step 1, go back and perform step 1!
• If you have any special software installed that manages its own recycle bin or allows to restore old states of the system this software could use the same facility as the SRPs. Therefore the data may just be hidden/inaccessible to WDS. Nothing to worry if the previous steps didn’t give a reson to worry.

// Oliver

PS: I am about to create a Wiki where users can maintain a FAQ and so on (and possibly translate the help).

If the comment-spam is an indicator for the popularity of this blog, then this blog is extra-ordinarily popular. 🙁

… via the feedback mailing list:

Good Day!

I found it interesting and decided to contact you for a business transaction. Be so kind to contact me at your earliest convenience for a possible business deal involving money transfer of about [$152,000.000 USD]

I am Dr.Smith Stone, the Auditor General of Standard Bank Of South Africa,during the course of our auditing,I discovered a floating fund in an account opened in the bank in 1990 and since 1993 nobody has operated on this account again.

Well Dr. Smith Stone, which features do you want to see? For this money I’d work two to three years fulltime on WDS … guess the other users would appreciate that as well 😉

// Oliver

A happy new year to everyone. May it be peaceful and full of health, fun and love for you and yours.

Thanks to those users sending a personal mail with best wishes.

// Oliver

Hi,

the WDS feedback mailing list is going to be moderated from now on. This decision was made since we finally get more spam than useful messages on this mailing list. Not moderating it means positive, rather than negative, feedback to the spammers which will send increasingly more messages …
I’ll of course attempt to approve legit messages as prompt as possible to me. I live in time zone GMT/UTC, just for everyone to know when to expect a moderation and when not.

Sorry,

// Oliver

I have a request to the developers among our users. If you would write a plugin for WDS, which functionality would you like to provide to the users? …this question aims to find out which hooks to provide. Also if you have special requests what functionality of WDS should be publicly available to a plugin, your feedback is needed.

Planned are the following callbacks/hooks: in the report system (on every item by its full name), cleanup menu items (e.g. a plugin could come with some extra application and instead of actually deleting files it could output some kind of script), retrieval of command line options, colors of the treemap items according to whatever property of the item (which the plugin has to manage! – ownership, file extension or file category such as multimedia file have been suggested!). The following functionality is planned to be public: menu items in a new main menu item “Plugins” (mainly to allow the plugins to have a GUI for config purposes), retrieval of some context data inside the above hooks. Maybe some kind of re-branding (probably adding a new tab in the about box) will be allowed. Continue reading →

Today WinDirStat was featured on the Japanese website “Windows Forest” today. Although I don’t know any Japanese it looks as if they like it 😉

In case one of you is Japanese and you want a Japanese translation in long-term, please talk to me. I cannot support you with it right now, though – and also Finnish and Estonian are still in the queue.

// Oliver

Occasionally people install (or run) WDS from a network drive/share. The HTML help file viewer of Windows, however, is configured so that it restricts all HTML content over the network, including these types of resources. Consequently the viewer will show a help file window with some weired error message that depends on your system language.

To fix this issue, the only known method is to move the help file (and hence the program) to a non-network location.

// Oliver

WDS shows a certain item labelled “<Unknown>” and recently someone posted a comment asking for details:

i think it would be nice to put in the faq or in help or in some docs what’s in the <unknown> space

sometimes it’s an huge amount of space! like 700 or more MB ! i think it could be the “system volume information” but! what mysterous things are within this space? he he he!

Continue reading →

Tonight I re-released the installer for WDS 1.1.2 once more to include the Dutch translation which I had forgotten to include in the last update from September. So if Dutch is your mother tongue and you’d like to get WinDirStat in this language as well, install WDS over the existing 1.1.2 version to get support for Dutch.

Finnish and Estonian are in the works. The translators have already sent these translations to me – however, I did not find the time to fix the files and include them, yet.

Again, this re-release is only for Dutch (and Belge) people. You won’t miss anything if you don’t need this language.

// Oliver

PS: Feedback about the Dutch version is welcome. I guess some strings don’t fit again. This will hopefully be fixed with the next major release of WDS, since I intent to use dynamically sized dialog elements that fit the content for any supported language …

Diese Woche am die c’t 21/06 raus und WinDirStat ist auf der CD enthalten und in einem (sehr kurzen) Artikel erwähnt. Genau weil ich schon vor Wochen von einem c’t-Redakteur angeschrieben wurde, gibt es überhaupt ein deutsches Setup.

// Oliver

This week c’t 21/06, a German computer magazine was published along with WinDirStat on the CD. Although the brief article misspells it as WindDirStat I am very glad it is featured there. Especially for this reason I had also prepared a German installer some weeks ago.

// Oliver