How To Find Out Folder Size In Windows?

For years, all through the lifetime of Windows, determining folder size remains one of the most demanded feature. It is understandable that updating the folder size all the time may impact performance but why not have that as an option which is disabled by default but readily available to the user?

However, this feature was left out even in the new Microsoft Windows Vista which was released in January 2007. This has spawned various software, be it freeware or shareware, for the purpose of finding out the size of folders in Windows.

Finding out the size of folders is very useful when you want to weed out folders that are taking up your hard drive space. To do this in Windows, you'll have to right-click on each folder, select Properties and wait for the system to scan through the subfolders and files within before reporting the size of that particular folder. A waste of time and resources, if you ask me.

This is especially problematic when the folder size is large (more than 1GB for example), with hundreds of files. Such folders will certainly take a long time to process. You can even brew yourself a cup of coffee and still have the process running when you get back.

So, is there a better method? To save time, I've actually found TWO pretty good solutions. One is by installing a Windows extension, the other is a software-based solution. I prefer the latter because I don't like the idea of having any service running in the background scanning the folders all the time, especially when I don't need it.