FolderSize: A size for your folders!

Ever find it annoying that the "Size" column doesn't show the size of folders, only files? Well, here's the next best thing. FolderSize creates another column called -you guessed it- "Folder Size." It does what you might think, it shows the size of the folders in a column just as if it were a file. In addition to that, though, it also shows the size of files, so it acts like the "Size" collumn too.

The advantages are obvious and abundant, and make it a very useful tool. But still, a few things that I think are annoying about it:

-Get used to right clicking: Basically for every folder that you want this column in, you have to ad it like you'd add any other column. I think the reason that when you install it, it doesn't apply everywhere is that there's a service that runs in the background, and if it were to add to every folder on your system, it might make that service eat RAM.

-A service: Yes, when installing FolderSize, it installs a service called FolderSizeSvc.exe, which "caches the sizes of all folders viewed in Explorer. The service monitors folders for changes and updates the cache in the background." You might think that this would eat up RAM, but I haven't noticed it doing anything of the sort. According to the developer's site, it does slow down the PC a slight bit (any service does...), but it doesn't consume CPU all the time. At the moment, it's at 5mb of RAM on my system. As it counts up folders, it steadily climbs in RAM. I just had it count 130gigs of data, and it used around 7% CPU at some parts, and at the very end it was using 10.5mb of RAM. But that's for the entire disk, and that every subfolder is already counted.

-Files in different order: Perhaps the next step in FolderSize, I would prefer files in the FolderSize column to be in line with folders, like in WinDirStat. Like I would like it to be:

Turtles [Folder] 20mb

Monkey.jpg 5mb

Freeware [Folder] 1mb

TheOfficeRocks.txt 23kb

But instead, it is like as follows:

Monkey.jpg 5mb

TheOfficeRocks.txt 23kb

Turtles [Folder] 20mb

Freeware [Folder] 1mb

It shows all the files by size, then all the folders by size, but I would like the option to combine them. I believe, though, that the creator said that Microsoft made this impossible, so I will have to be content.

Foldersize is pretty darn handy, but I just wouldn't recommend it on systems with a small amount of RAM. Other than that, it's incredibly useful.

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