Download Squad had a great article recently listing 24 open-source, free tools for admins and technicians. I'm already sold on PuTTY, DBAN, Memtest86/Memtest86+ and 7-Zip, but there are some real gems out there that I hadn't even heard of.
WCD in particular scratches an itch I've had since giving up Norton ncd many a year ago and being spoiled by locate under *nix. You do need to know how to manually set a Path variable, but otherwise it works as advertised.
They did have one recommendation that is good, but I think you can do better... Visualization tools for data are invaluable in giving you a meaningful picture (literally) of what is and is not taking up space. They recommend a product called WinDirStat.
WinDirStat looks like a re-working of the same concept that was pioneered by SequoiaView: "Cushion Treemaps" to visualize data. The strength of this method is that it can show individual files and folders easily by size and type, and groups them together, but the weakness is that it lacks a true hierarchical view. It's also a very busy interface which makes it hard to tell usage in terms of rough percentages or amounts. Unfortunately, SequoiaView lacks any type of obvious licensing. You're probably safe to use it for any purpose, but it's not OSS. It's also rapidly aging, so WinDirStat looks like a great replacement.
There are times when it is the best tool for the job, but for a first-pass on a Windows system I prefer an application called Scanner, written buy a guy named Steffan Gerlach. The licensing is also unclear, but presumed freeware with the source supplied. This app has the strength of being able to show disk usage as a pie chart, with a hierarchical view. It lacks color coding by file and doesn't show individual files at all until you drill down into that directory. It is, however, nice and portable, so you can run it from a USB drive or a network share.
Between the two, you should have pair of complementary products that'll allow you to better manage your storage.
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