About Folder Size for Windows

What does it do?

Folder Size for Windows adds a new column to the Details view in Windows Explorer. The new column shows not only the size of files, but also the size of folders. It keeps track of which folders you view, and scans them in the background so you can see complete size of all files within the folder. It's very useful for cleaning up your disk. Once you get used to having that information available, a directory listing simply looks incomplete without it!

Features

Don't switch to another program to see folder sizes. It's always there when you're viewing your folders (even in Open and Save file dialog boxes, you can change the view), and it's a great visual cue to help you find the one you're looking for. Not just for disk cleanup, but for any time you need to choose a folder.
No scanning phase before you can start. As soon as you display the Folder Size column, you'll see sizes immediately. Large folders will continue to scan in the background while you browse your folders.
Explorer will automatically update the folder size column in real-time. No more manual rescanning.
Background scans won't monopolize your disk. When Folder Size detects that other programs are doing a lot of reading to and writing from the hard disk being scanned, the background scanning will wait for the other programs to finish.
If you don't show the Folder Size column for a while, it won't forget what it's already scanned, but the background scanner doesn't stay active. It won't waste any CPU time maintaining the cache on your P2P sharing or gaming machine that's always changing files.

If your version of Windows is one of the following languages, Folder Size will also display in that language. More translations and corrections to existing translations are welcome.

French
Spanish
German
Italian
Dutch
Swedish
Japanese
Traditional Chinese
Simplified Chinese

Folder Size is Free

Folder Size for Windows may be distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. This basically says that it's free for anyone to use, and the code is free to be read and used, but if you modify the code at all, you must submit your improvements back to the project so everyone can use them.

So far, Kirill Müller has submitted a patch that fixes the sorting and adds new columns, and Markus Cozowicz is reviewing the code for future improvements.

Translations have been submitted by a bunch of people.

Additional Notes

Folder Size for Windows runs on Windows 2000 and XP, though has been tested almost exclusively on Windows XP. Sorry, not Vista.

Folder Size for Windows is split up into three components: The service which caches folder size information and makes it available to other processes; a column handler shell extension that makes a column available to Windows Explorer using data retrieved from the service, and a control panel for configuration.

Folder Size for Windows is written in C++ using Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003. See the source code!