                   ShowMan - Disk Utilisation Pie-Chart

PURPOSE

The ShowMan utility was written to help you keep disk space under control.  
It does this by presenting a pie chart of what is on your hard disk or 
network drive, and allowing you to drill down into different sub-folders.  
In this way, you can quickly identify what is taking up most space on your 
hard disk, and decide what to delete.  ShowMan is purely a read-only tool, 
quite deliberately it does not include any way of deleting files or folders!  
You could consider my WinTidy program for removing backup and other temporary 
files, or my FindDupl program for detecting and deleting duplicate files.  
ShowMan knows about hard disk cluster sizes, and will normally report the 
actual space occupied on the disk, rather than the nominal file size.  In 
this way, the full penalty of having a large number of small files is 
clearly visible.

ShowMan's home page is here:

  http://www.satsignal.eu/software/disk.html#ShowMan


INSTALLATION AND USAGE

Extract ShowMan.exe from the zip file to a suitable location and run it!


SUPPORT POLICY

This program is currently freeware, but you must register for any technical 
support.  For details about how to register, please see:

  http://www.satsignal.eu/software/reg-disk-tools.html


USING ShowMan

When run, ShowMan will automatically scan the current folder, and most likely 
if you have extracted all the files in this archive to one folder, 
ShowMan.exe itself will be the biggest file.  Try using the Open menu or 
toolbar button to select another folder.  Also note that all files are found, 
even those marked with the hidden or system attributes.  While you shouldn't 
delete such files unless you _really_ know what you are doing, that's no 
reason for not being aware of the space they occupy.

Optionally, if you make a shortcut for ShowMan, you can have one parameter 
which causes the initial folder to be set and scanned.  

ShowMan will attempt to add a registry entry so that right-clicking a folder 
or drive will include a "Usage PieChart" menu item to invoke ShowMan for that 
folder tree or disk.  You can prevent this behaviour with the View, Options 
dialog.  If you remove ShowMan you may manually need to remove the registry 
key:

  HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\UsagePieChart
  HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Drive\shell\UsagePieChart

to remove the right-click menu entry.  Please exercise care when editing the 
registry.  


NOTES

The program runs on Windows 2000, XP and Windows Vista.
It may also work, but is not supported, on Windows 95, 98 and NT 4.0

When dealing with NTFS-compressed files, the "nominal" display refers to the 
compressed size, and the "allocated" display refers to the cluster size 
quantised space actually allocated on disk by the compressed file.  This 
behaviour can be prevented by using the View, Options, Compression tab.

You can get the program to automatically repeat the scan, for example if you 
are monitoring a server.  See the View, Options, Timer tab.

Under certain conditions, the size of a .URL file may be incorrectly 
reported.


CURRENT RELEASE INFORMATION

Release V6.0.6.63
V6.0.6  2010 Aug 08  Improve legibility of item list

(Earlier release information with acknowledgements to the many people who
have made suggestions is in History.txt in the Zip archive.)


PROGRAM STATUS AND DISTRIBUTION

This program is freeware, and remains copyright of David J Taylor, Edinburgh, 
1997-2008.  This program is provided "as is", without any support.  Whilst I 
cannot answer queries from unregistered users relating to the use of this 
program, I'd value any comments or suggestions for improvements you may have 
(and there is considerable feedback from users in the present version of 
ShowMan).  Requests for distribution must be referred to the author, but will 
usually be granted if no commercial gain is involved.

If you find the program useful, and wish to say "thank you", please register.
If you use this program in a commercial environment, in a business or other
profit-making concern, you should register a commercial licence for the 
Disk Tools here:

  http://www.satsignal.eu/software/reg-disk-tools.html


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

TdfsVersionInfoResource & TBrowseDirectoryDlg were from Brad Stowers
but were replaceds for this version as Delphi 2009 components from
Brad were not available.


CONTACTING THE AUTHOR

Web site:  http://www.satsignal.eu
E-mail:    davidtaylor@writeme.com
2010 Aug 08