When I put together my gaming PC at home, I cut corners in some areas in order to afford the best components in others. For optimal game performance, I wanted a fast processor and a high-quality video card. To afford those components, I bought a lower-end monitor and hard drive and went with less RAM. I've since bought a better monitor and keyboard and added some RAM, but my hard drive has remained the 40GB drive that I started with.

Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but even though all I had was a 40GB drive, I thought it would be a long time before I filled it up. After all, it seems like it was only a few years ago that I was marveling over the voluminous space of my friend's 80MB external hard drive. That 40GB is plenty of space, right?

With games as advanced and storage intensive as they are today, 40GB is next to nothing in the grand scheme of things. A couple of weeks ago, I was shocked to find that I had less than 3GB of free storage left. But instead of trying to add up how much storage was being used in each game folder, I looked around for a program that would visually show me which files and folders took up the most space. The handiest utilities I found calculated file and folder sizes and presented them in a tree format, according to which was taking up the most space. From there, it was easy to see which folders I could do without to free up space before making my next big hard drive purchase.

i.Disk shows you a tree structure so that you can see where all the space is being used up. From there, you can delete unused parts of the tree. You can also search by extension, which comes in handy if you want to delete extraneous movie files or images that you no longer need, for example. (Free/Windows)

TreeSize shows you a tree structure like i.Disk's but gives you more options for how it's viewed and what you can do with the data. This one has good sorting capabilities so that you can quickly find what's eating up the majority of your hard drive space. I like this one the best for sizing up hard drive space.(Free/Windows)

SizeExplorer Pro gives you a tree structure, but you can also view your drive in a colorful graph and sort by a number of different criteria, such as file types and file size. This one has the most options, making it the most useful, but it costs $35. (Shareware/Windows)

To get a good look at your drives, try one of these programs. And if you have an 80MB hard drive lying around, I could probably use it. Wait...I meant 80GB!