Thursday, September 11, 2008

Reclaim the Hard disk space the Easy way

How many times have you run out of space on your C: drive and wondered… where did all my free space go? If you are tech savvy you'll probably open up your CCleaner shortcut and clean out the temp files, but where has the rest gone?

The answer is a great little freeware utility called DriveSpacio that helps you find out where all that free space has gone, similar to the more well known WinDirStat utility. The benefit of using this one is that it integrates directly into the Explorer shell and has a lot more reports.

Using DriveSpacio

Once you've downloaded and opened the utility, you'll see a screen with the hard drives in your computer. For instance, if you look in my Computer dialog, you'll see 3 hard drives and some other USB drives.

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So the Drives tab in DriveSpacio will show you a graphical view of all drives on your computer, with all sorts of great charts and graphs.

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Different views are offered, such as pie charts or the bar graph view seen below:

bar chart view

DriveSpacio integrates into Windows Explorer so you are able to right click on a drive and analyze it. You can also launch the application and open a specific drive, or even just a specific sub-folder if you want. I find this to be helpful because I can choose to only look in my user folder.

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After scanning you really get a nice chart of the folders and files on the drive and exactly how much space they are taking up.

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The interface has an explorer type feel and you can go through each folder and directory to get statistics, and the graph on the right-hand pane will change based on where in the tree you are.

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You can also right-click on anything and choose to delete it right from the DriveSpacio window.

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The Folders tab gives a great in-depth look at what folders are hogging space. You can toggle between either a bar graph or a pie chart, and choose to alternate between showing Kilobytes, Megabytes, or Gigabytes.

pie graph

Another benefit of using this application is that there's a portable version that doesn't require any installation. Very useful for adding to your portable USB flash toolkit.

Download DriveSpacio for Windows

Testing Software isnt a cake walk

Every one thinks in software industry, Software testing division is a cursed one. But I feel interesting when I happened to test a Website.
But Website testing differs from Software testing. Though I'm doing testing now, I share my experience later. Lets review on the different kind of Software testing.

  • ACCEPTANCE TESTING. Testing to verify a product meets customer specified requirements. A customer usually does this type of testing on a product that is developed externally.
  • BLACK BOX TESTING. Testing without knowledge of the internal workings of the item being tested. Tests are usually functional.
  • COMPATIBILITY TESTING. Testing to ensure compatibility of an application or Web site with different browsers, OSs, and hardware platforms. Compatibility testing can be performed manually or can be driven by an automated functional or regression test suite.
  • CONFORMANCE TESTING. Verifying implementation conformance to industry standards. Producing tests for the behavior of an implementation to be sure it provides the portability, interoperability, and/or compatibility a standard defines.
  • FUNCTIONAL TESTING. Validating an application or Web site conforms to its specifications and correctly performs all its required functions. This entails a series of tests which perform a feature by feature validation of behavior, using a wide range of normal and erroneous input data. This can involve testing of the product's user interface, APIs, database management, security, installation, networking, etcF testing can be performed on an automated or manual basis using black box or white box methodologies.
  • INTEGRATION TESTING. Testing in which modules are combined and tested as a group. Modules are typically code modules, individual applications, client and server applications on a network, etc. Integration Testing follows unit testing and precedes system testing.
  • LOAD TESTING. Load testing is a generic term covering Performance Testing and Stress Testing.
  • PERFORMANCE TESTING. Performance testing can be applied to understand your application or WWW site's scalability, or to benchmark the performance in an environment of third party products such as servers and middleware for potential purchase. This sort of testing is particularly useful to identify performance bottlenecks in high use applications. Performance testing generally involves an automated test suite as this allows easy simulation of a variety of normal, peak, and exceptional load conditions.
  • REGRESSION TESTING. Similar in scope to a functional test, a regression test allows a consistent, repeatable validation of each new release of a product or Web site. Such testing ensures reported product defects have been corrected for each new release and that no new quality problems were introduced in the maintenance process. Though regression testing can be performed manually an automated test suite is often used to reduce the time and resources needed to perform the required testing.
  • SMOKE TESTING. A quick-and-dirty test that the major functions of a piece of software work without bothering with finer details. Originated in the hardware testing practice of turning on a new piece of hardware for the first time and considering it a success if it does not catch on fire.
  • STRESS TESTING. Testing conducted to evaluate a system or component at or beyond the limits of its specified requirements to determine the load under which it fails and how. A graceful degradation under load leading to non-catastrophic failure is the desired result. Often Stress Testing is performed using the same process as Performance Testing but employing a very high level of simulated load.
  • SYSTEM TESTING. Testing conducted on a complete, integrated system to evaluate the system's compliance with its specified requirements. System testing falls within the scope of black box testing, and as such, should require no knowledge of the inner design of the code or logic.
  • UNIT TESTING. Functional and reliability testing in an Engineering environment. Producing tests for the behavior of components of a product to ensure their correct behavior prior to system integration.
  • WHITE BOX TESTING. Testing based on an analysis of internal workings and structure of a piece of software. Includes techniques such as Branch Testing and Path Testing. Also known as Structural Testing and Glass Box Testing.