MOBZHunt is a free program for Windows that does what Windows Explorer cannot: It calculates the size of all folders stored under a root directory that the user of the software specifies. This way it is possible to find the largest folder of the c: drive, the my documents folder or any other folder, partition or drive that is accessible on the computer system.

The program is fairly easy to operate. All you need to do is to enter a drive letter or path, or use the browse for folder button to select a folder from the computer.

A click on open scans the path and computes the space requirements of every folder located under that root path.

The left sidebar lists the folders, while the right the folders of the currently selected root folder. Information laid out there includes the folder name, total size and the last modification date. A click on the any folder opens the very same information for that folder’s subfolders.

The status bar lists the total site requirements, number of folders and files of the root folder. MOBZHunt is a handy program for Windows users who want to find the largest folders on their Windows system. This can be helpful to find folders that can be deleted to free up space on the system.

The software program is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the Windows operating system. It requires the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 to be installed on the system.

To get started, you need to download New Folder Wizard. The file is very small, weighing in at a mere 165 Kb, so you should have it sitting on your computer in no time. It comes as a lone .exe file, and it does not need installation or access to anything on your computer except your directories and, in our case, a .txt file.

Open New Folder Wizard and review the interface before continuing.

At this point you can go ahead and point the program towards the higher folder you would like yours created it. Do this by clicking Browse near the top of the window and creating a path to your ultimate container folder. Next you are going to create a .txt file containing the list of dates you would like created. First, open Microsoft Excel or a similar program. Type the first date you would like created in the first cell, and then click the tiny black box in the bottom right corner of that cell and pull it straight down for as many days as you would like created. Remember two things at this point: 1) this will create a range of consecutive dates, and if you want a few removed, you must manually delete those rows, and 2) Excel defaults to the “/” character for dates, which will be replaced later as an incompatible character, so if you don’t like underscores between the month, day, and year, set it to a different character.

Now highlight the vertical fields with dates in them and copy the group. Open Notepad or a similar editor and paste the information, saving the file as a .txt in an easily accessed folder like the Desktop.

At this point you are almost finished and need only to tell New Folder Wizard to wrap things up. In the program’s window click the checkbox beside Use text file for folder names, unlocking the field above. Browse your way to the next text file and select it. Verify that everything is correct using the Preview button – if you had forward slashes in your dates it will let you know it replaced them – and if the prospective folders look correct click Create!.

You have just created a range of dated folders in which you can throw your piles of daily files! Wave goodbye to your cluttered Documents file and hello to organization.

A more practical solution is Shell Bags View, a Nirsoft application, that will display these information in its interface. Shell Bags View is the typical Nirsoft application. It is portable and works with a wide variety of Windows operating systems. The program will display the folder information that are stored in the Windows Registry upon startup.

The folder information is displayed in a table that can be sorted by clicking on one of the columns. The usual report options are available that include generating a html report and saving selected items in a file. An option to delete items is not offered but it is possible to open a specific slot item in the Windows Registry.

Shell Bags View is a portable software program for the Windows operating system. Its main use is the analysis of the folders that have been opened in the operating system. The software is compatible with most Windows operating systems including Windows Vista and Windows 7. It can be downloaded from the Nirsoft website.

Flashfolder to the rescue. Flashfolder is small tool that docks a window onto open and save dialogs in Windows, giving users options to access favorite folders, currently open file folders and the global folder history each, with two clicks. The absolute path of the current folder is displayed as well which is ideal if you want to manually change it in case you are a fast typing user.

Flashfolder can be configured for three types of dialogs, those are Common Open / Save, Common Browser for folder and Microsoft Office Open / Save dialogs. Each comes with an option to exclude applications from showing the Flashfolder overlay and with options to set a minimum height, width and position of the overlay window.

Flashfolders uses less than 2 Megabytes of Ram while running which is excellent. It adds itself to as a service in Windows which is essential for compatibility according to the author of the program.

Update: The latest program version has been released in 2008. The program does not appear to be compatible with versions of Windows that have been released after that year.

The configuration window comes with options to separate folders from each other, first with separators and then with the addition of submenus to the program. You could for instance separate work from entertainment folders, or local and network folders from each other.

I’m not aware of any alternative to the program at the moment. Please let everyone know if you are aware of an alternative.

More problematic though can be that it could grow so big that the partition of your Windows operating system is not big enough to contain all of the files anymore. This happened to me. I was clever enough to create a 8 Gigabyte C: partition for Windows XP which was soon to small because of music and images that have been saved in that folder.

Instead of moving single application folders to another drive I decided to find a way to move the MyDocuments folder instead. This is actually pretty easy.

Press Windows E to start up Windows Explorer. Right-click the MyDocuments folder and select Properties from the menu. The Target Folder Location displays the current location of the MyDocuments folder. If you click on the Move button below you may select a new folder or hard drive and move the contents of the MyDocuments folder there.

After all of this is done right-click a file, folder or drive and select Change Icon from the context menu. A window pops up showing the path to the file, folder or drive. You will have to choose a icon library, some of which can be loaded from the developers page, and all the icons of that library will be displayed.

Just click on the icon that you want to use and use the optional “Use icon for all files of that type” if you wish that as well. Changes will be visible immediately and you can repeat the process if you don’t like the icon anymore.