Blog: ShowSize, Articles and tips

I’m scanning a huge disk with ShowSize and Windows is reporting a disk space shortage error. What folder does ShowSize use to keep its scanned results? Can that folder be redirected?

ShowSize uses the default “temporary” folder set up in Windows. You can redirect it by using any of the tips found on microsoft.com or other Windows web sites. Just type “redirect temporary folder in windows” on Google and you may find many tips on this.

I will try to explain the steps below.

First, you can verify that ShowSize is indeed using the temporary folder set up in Windows. To do this, first click on Start–Run in Windows to bring up the Run prompt. On Windows Vista, type Run in the Search Box that appears at the bottom on the Start menu. Type %temp% in the Open box and click OK. This will open the temporary folder. If ShowSize is running, you will see some file names starting with drm and drv there. These temporary files disappear as soon as you stop ShowSize.

You need to redirect this temporary folder by specifying another folder on a drive that has plenty of space. Once you do that, all your programs including ShowSize will start using the new location to store temporary files.

Here are the steps to redirect this temporary folder.

• Right click on the My Computer icon on desktop to see Properties.

• Select the Advanced page (or Advanced System Settings on Vista).

• Click on the “Environment Variables” button. It displays the Environment Variables as shown below.

  

• The variables that we want to change are TMP and TEMP in the User Variables.

  In the “User variables” frame, select the TMP variable and click on Edit button. Type new value as a folder on some other drive where there is plenty of space, for example, “E:\TEMP”. Don’t use the root of the drive as some programs can face problems. Always use a subfolder that you create specifically for this purpose.

  

  Similarly, edit the value of the TEMP variable too to point to the new location above.

  

The same steps should work on Windows XP, Windows 2000, 2003 and Vista. But sometimes the redirection will work only after a reboot.

You can verify whether the temporary folder is redirected properly by following the same procedure that I explained at the top of this article to look for DRM and DRV files when running ShowSize.

System variables: What about the TMP and TEMP variables in the lower System Variables list? If you change them, they are set up for all the users of the computer but then they should be deleted from the user variables list of all the users. If you don’t understand this, it’s ok. It is an advanced concept.

I will attempt to explain why we had to discontinue the “Unused files report” on Windows Vista and why I advise not to use it even on earlier Windows systems now.

Vista breaks the “Unused Files” feature for NTFS:

On Vista, by default the “last access date” of the files are not updated on NTFS file systems. Microsoft did this to improve Vista performance on NTFS systems.

This means that the above information is useless for all the files on NTFS volumes. There is a registry tweak possible so that Vista starts updating the “last access date” of files. But even then the information won’t be useful for quite some time. For example, if you switch on this feature now you will have to wait for at least 30 days of use to get a report that shows files not used in last 30 days. Hence, it’s not a good solution as there is no way for ShowSize to determine when the tweak was made. In other words, one can never rely on Unused column or the Unused Files report. Besides this tweak might run into performance issues on Vista.

Corporate/LAN users, beware: Moreover, if many Vista systems are using files on a shared NTFS volume, some will update the last access date and some won’t depending on whether they were fixed with the registry tweak. So on a shared volume you can never be sure if the Unused Files report is useful at all.

THE HARD DECISION THAT WE MADE: Hence, it’s not possible to find a decent solution to this problem. We can at most give warning messages on Vista for NTFS volumes. But we can never be sure on shared volumes. Hence, in the newer ShowSize 5, we have entirely dropped this Unused Files report and the Used column in all the reports on Windows Vista.

This article is old. The new ShowSize 5 natively supports Windows Vista.

Important points about running ShowSize 4 on Vista:

• Note that we have a new version ShowSize 5, about to be released, that supports Vista officially. However, if you are trying to run ShowSize 4 on Vista, it might not run unless you fix a DEP setting as described in the following steps.
   
• You should not rely on the “Unused Files Report” or the Used Column in other reports as Windows Vista breaks this feature. There is no easy solution to this problem and hence, we have disabled this report in the new ShowSize 5 on Vista. Once again, if you run ShowSize 4 on Vista, DO NOT USE the unused files report.

Details of running ShowSize 4 on Windows Vista:
(In particular, please see the last point on Unused Files, marked in red)

Please look at the following information only if you want to run ShowSize 4 on Vista. Paid users can instead get the latest pre-release version 5 from the user support area.

1. Windows DEP settings on Vista:

   If you can’t run ShowSize at all (it stops immediately) then a DEP setting can fix it. This is explained in the following steps.

   1. Click on Start–Settings–Control Panel–System
   2. Click on Advanced page tab
   3. Click on the button Settings under Performance
   4. On the Performance Options that comes up, click on the Data Execution Prevention page tab
   5. If you want to know what DEP is, please click on “How does it work” link on that page.
   6. The default setting in XP used to be “Turn on DEP for essential programs and services only.” If that setting is already used, it won’t cause a problem with other software. However, if the second setting is selected, “Turn on DEP for all programs…” then that setting might cause problems with many applications like ShowSize.

   There can be two solutions:

   • Solution 1: Click on the first setting “Turn on DEP for essential programs and services only.” This will fix similar problems with all such applications which can’t run because of DEP setting.

   • Solution 2: Or, if you do want to use DEP and would prefer to keep the second setting, you must add selected programs to the Exceptions List below it. To add ShowSize to the exception list, please follow this procedure:
     • Click on Add button below the list.
     • Browse to the folder where ShowSize is installed. This is usually the folder, c:\program files\ShowSize…\ depending on which ShowSize version you are using.
     • Select the file showsize.exe or showsizepe.exe and click on Open.
     • Click on Apply.

     If the problem you are facing is related to DEP then the problem will go away.

2. ShowSize Help on Vista:
   If you can not see ShowSize help from the Help menu then your copy of Vista does not have the old format Windows Help. Here is the link to the to a page that gives more detils on how to fix this problem: WinHelp on Windows Vista

3. Error report on System Disk scans:
   On Windows Vista, if you scan the system disk with ShowSize, it will work fine except that it might give a list of errors showing which files it couldn’t access for getting the compressed size. This is normal. These files are locked by Windows and ShowSize can not get compressed sizes for them. In the next version, ShowSize will have an option to ignore these errors.

4. Installing ShowSize actions on the Explorer right-click menu:

   On Windows Vista, you need to run ShowSize as administrator to install the above menus (a Tools operation). After that, you can exit and run it as normal.

5. Vista breaks the “Unused Files” feature for NTFS:

   On Vista, by default the “last access date” of the files are not updated on NTFS file systems. Microsoft did this to improve Vista performance on NTFS systems.

   This means that the above information is useless for all the files on NTFS volumes. There is a registry tweak possible so that Vista starts updating the “last access date” of files. But even then the information won’t be useful for quite some time. For example, if you switch on this feature now you will have to wait for at least 30 days of use to get a report that shows files not used in last 30 days. Hence, it’s not a good solution as there is no way for ShowSize to determine when the tweak was made. In other words, one can never rely on Unused column or the Unused Files report. Besides this tweak might run into performance issues on Vista.

   Corporate/LAN users, beware: Moreover, if many Vista systems are using files on a shared NTFS volume, some will update the last access date and some won’t depending on whether they were fixed with the registry tweak. So on a shared volume you can never be sure if the Unused Files report is useful at all.

   THE HARD DECISION THAT WE MADE: Hence, it’s not possible to find a decent solution to this problem. We can at most give warning messages on Vista for NTFS volumes. But we can never be sure on shared volumes. Hence, in the newer ShowSize 5, we have entirely dropped this Unused Files report and the Used column in all the reports on Windows Vista.

On NetWare volumes, regardless of the default cluster size, a feature called “Block Suballocation” can be enabled. This feature allows the NetWare file system to “reuse” the wasted cluster space by allowing other files to write to the “wasted” portions of existing clusters.

If you are using NetWare volumes all the time and don’t want wasted space reported at all, in ShowSize, you can remove the columns “Wasted Space” and “Size on Disk” by dragging them off the report or by using the “Columns” toolbar button.