Since my childhood, the Diwali season has been the season of cleaning. It’s like the Spring season. Every corner of the home should look new, dusted, and organized. “Rejuvenated”, that’s the word I was looking for.

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Although the necessity of cleaning has decreased over the years, I can still feel the spirit of this season.
So I thought, why not share ideas on digital cleaning our workspace?

I’m sure you might not be taking up a broom and cleaning your office space–because the cleaning staff would have mostly taken care of that.
But there’s a more important space that most of us don’t get to think of as a space: our PC.

Cleaning in two parts

This week, in today’s letter, we will discuss macro-cleaning. It will be a bit manual, but worth it. (This letter will be applicable only for Windows PCs, though.)
​Next week, we will discuss about micro-cleaning. You won’t need to do much to get your PC cleaned completely.

Indications that your PC needs cleaning

There are some tell-tale signs:

  • Slow PC
  • Constantly running out of storage
  • Takes forever to boot

“I want to clean my PC, but I don’t know which folders to check first”

If you’re using a Windows PC, you can’t see a complete break-up of your storage. The system doesn’t give you a way to look at the biggest files or smallest files in a dedicated window. It is all messy and sloow.

That’s why, this free TreeSize software​

I think the name is due to its feature of providing a Tree-style map of the computer folders. Just ignore the name, the important thing is that it does the job.
You can download the official copy of this software from here.

A quick guide on using it

Step-1

Once you have downloaded and installed it, open “TreeSize Free” by clicking “Run as administrator”.

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Step-2

This is how the first screen may look. The layout may differ as I haven’t updated my software copy lately.

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Step-3

In this step, you need to click on menu item-1 and select a drive that you want to scan and check the distribution of its content.

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Also, a brief list of the options as seen in the screenshot above:
​Menu item-1: Let you select the directory
​Menu item-2: Let you stop the scan abruptly
​Menu item-3: You can refresh the folders once the scan is complete
​Menu item-4: Selecting this would provide you with the actual size of the folders/files (please don’t select this mode, it is not useful to us)
​Menu item-5: This would be the default option, it shows us the “allocated space” of the folders/files on the space. This is what we are interested in
​Menu item-6: This one would show us the number of files in a folder
​Menu item-7: This would show occupied space in terms of the percentage of the parent folder
​Menu item-8: The default is good, but if you want to see the break-up size in other units, you can play with these options

Step-4

Once you have selected a drive and scanned it, it will immediately show you the storage break-up. The folders will be sorted in descending order of size, so the biggest folders in size will be displayed first.
In the following screenshot, you can see:

  • I have selected my C Drive
  • Out of the total space of 219 GB on my C Drive, most of it is used by the first three folders
  • The Users folder is hogging 44% of my total C Drive storage!

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Step-5

Clean!
Tracking down the biggest folders first and deleting unnecessary folders/files would begin your first round of cleaning.
You can collapse these folders by clicking on the side-arrow and delete any unnecessary folder by right-clicking on it.
Repeat it for all of your drives and you’re all set for the deeper, more automatic cleaning.
​And we will cover it next week!

I hope you get some time to clean your workspace. Just remember, if you don’t know what the purpose of a folder is, do not delete it. So, go ahead and download the TreeSize Free tool and let the Diwali spirit take its shape!
Don’t forget to Hit Reply and share your story of slow PCs with me.

Reads of the week:

The invisible gorilla

​Link​
If you were an experienced Radiologist, regularly looking at people’s X-Rays and CT scan reports, would you miss out on a gorilla printed on a report?
Turns out, you may do. Because 83% of the radiologists covered in this research didn’t notice a big gorilla on the CT scan report. It was 48 times larger than the average nodule that they’re used to detecting in the report.
So, what’s going on?
The researchers are calling it Inattentional Blindness.
The idea springs from similar experiments carried out by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris in 1999.
Enjoy this 2 minute clipand see if you can beat the challenge.

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