Most people are used to running a “Free up disk space/defrag” combo on their computers every so often to try and improve performance, but what happens when your computer starts to run as if it’s bogged down in molasses, and you just can’t imagine what’s causing the lag?
Over the past few years I have moved a lot, so I am used to using a laptop rather than a desktop. I have also lived in a country (Spain) where a stable internet connection meant driving to the largest office building I could find looking for unlocked wifi networks and parking outside until I had managed to access my emails. In 100 degree weather and a car with no a/c this was not fun for either me, or my laptop.
After a couple of years of continuous use my laptop finally got heat stroke and died a sudden and painful (at least for me) death, taking much of my precious work with it to the grave. Fortunately, I am lucky to have an IT Angel who was able to resurrect my work, but I learned a valuable lesson about treating my laptops with more respect.
Now, most of my files are kept on a portable hard drive, which not only serves as a secondary backup (I’ll be talking more about my primary data backup method later) but in theory, should also keep the memory use of my laptop to a minimum. So when it starts to run slow, sometimes it’s a little harder to find the memory hog.
Enter WinDirStat. This neat little program will give you a visual breakdown of your hard drive, showing you where the most memory is being used, allowing you to go in and manually clear out anything that is unnecessarily gobbling up space.
Get more info and download it here for free.
Oh, and another reason I love this program… the cool little animated Pacman characters that show the program working. Egg timers and spinning discs are SO boring. 
