Sooner or later, that shiny new hard drive you bought (and thought would be enough space forever and ever) gets full. Then it’s time to do some housekeeping and decide what to move elsewhere and what to leave be.

Choosing which files in your collection have to go can be a harrowing process. A tool that I’ve found very useful when it comes time to take a good hard look at what’s on your hard drive is WinDirStat.

This nifty little tool scans all your drives (complete with endearing Pac-man progress bars) and presents you a visual representation of what’s taking up all your megabytes. It also shows you where on the drive the files physically are, which may please the nerd in some people (like me). More importantly, it lets you sort files by type – so you can discover whether it’s your mass of movies, music or pictures that need to get stored somewhere else to give you back your hard drive.