Neat little tip to see size of your folders.
Want to see the size of your folders and not just files in your Windows XP Explorer listings?
If you are interested, Sequoia View is a very useful tool to do some nifty things with your folders. Other than that, this following note is now showing its age. If sorting and such is not necessary, a simple mouse-over your folders in Explorer will show you a tooltip with an approximate size of your directories. The menu option
Tools --> Options --> View --> Show file size in folder tips should let you control the behavior of this tooltip.Well it’s probably a simple feature that the Windows team at Microsoft forgot to include, so Mark Dormer has a solution. Just download his tiny DLL file:
It’s an EXE file. All you really have to do is:
- Copy the file to your
c:\windows\system32folder. - Execute the following command in Start — > Run dialogue box and you’re ready to roll:
regsvr32 c:\windows\system32\dirsize.dll
- Now open Explorer in details view, you wont see the column yet. Right click on a heading in the right pane and select “Folder Size”.
Couple of Caveats
- Calculating folder size is a turtle on very large folders with lots of subfolders. There’s no indexing built into this.
- As much you and I would like, this tool doesn’t do sorting of folders based on the folder size. You may want to give another utility a try, the Folder Shell Extension.
Couple of Tips
- To apply this setting for all the folder, click Tools, Folder Options. In the View tab and click Apply to all folders.
- To remove the feature, simply un-register the DLL later with the following command (ignore error messages if any) — regsvr32 /u %Systemroot%\System32\Dirsize.dll
Hope this helps.
This post is tagged Explorer, Microsoft, Tips/Tricks, Windows

4 Comments
The link :Download Mark Dormer’s Folderview DLL
is a bad link.
markd.mvps.org/DirSize.dll Returns a page cannot be found error.
Has any one used this program and does it work?
You can get the DLL by downloading the demo project from http://www.codeproject.com/shell/DirectorySize.asp?df=100&forumid=26286&exp=0&select=1151181
Good Tip. This is now superceded by this freeware program (and others no doubt!) I found on softpedia get it here: http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/OS-Enhancements/Folder-Size-Explorer-Extension.shtml
After placing dll in system32 folder, RegSvr32 complains “not an executable file and no registration helper is registered for this file type”?
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