Frequently Asked Questions

WinDirStat

Frequently Asked Questions

Does the treemap relate to the allocation of hard disk sectors?

No. The treemap view has nothing to do with hard disk sectors. Generally big files are scattered on the hard disk. The treemap on the other hand shows each file as one rectangle.

Does WinDirStat start threads for the read jobs?

No. WinDirStat is - apart from the about box, which runs in an own thread, and apart from the drive querying in the drive selection dialog - single-threaded. All work is done in OnIdle().

What does the item <Files> mean?

See Legend.

What does the > symbol in front of the column captions mean?

The > and < symbols in the column headers indicate the current sorting.

On my XP WinDirStat shows more than a GB <Unknown>, what's wrong?

Nothing. XP quite often creates rather big 'System restore points' under C:\System Volume Information, but denies access to it.

What is the file wdsr0407.dll for?

This file contains the German translation of WinDirStat. 0407 is the language identifier for "German - Germany". If this file is absent, then WinDirStat is available in the (built-in) language English only.

The size information in KB and MB seems to be a bit too small.

WinDirStat sticks to the computing convention, that "kilo" doesn't stand for 1000 but for 1024. So we have:
1 KB = 1024 Bytes
1 MB = 1024 KB = 1,048,576 Bytes
1 GB = 1024 MB = 1,048,576 KB = 1,073,741,824 Bytes.