                   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.


Installation & 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 support.  
For details about how to register, please see:

  http://www.satsignal.net  => Software, Register, Disk Tools


Required library:

If you don't already have Borland's run-time library, you will also need to 
download the file VCL50.zip from any site offering it.  For example:

  www.satsignal.net  =>  Software, Runtime libraries

Extract the file VCL50.BPL from this archive and copy to your Windows System
folder (e.g. \Windows\System or \WinNT\System32).  Be careful not to overwrite
newer versions of this file with older versions.  If in doubt, simply copy
the VCL50.BPL to the same folder as ShowMan.exe.

There is no need to extract any of the source files which are also in the ZIP 
archive.  They are not required to run 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 95, 98, 2000 and Windows 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.


Current release information:

V5.1.2  2001 Jul 04  Fix memory leak on repeated scans

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


Program Status & Distribution:

This program is freeware, and remains copyright of David J Taylor, Edinburgh, 
1997-2002.  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.  Some source code is 
available by e-mail to registered users.  You can register at: 

  http://www.satsignal.net  => Software, Register, Disk Tools

TdfsVersionInfoResource & TBrowseDirectoryDlg are from Brad Stowers
  http://www.pobox.com/~bstowers/delphi/
  Copyright bstowers@pobox.com (CompuServe 72733,3374)


Contacting the author:

Web site:  www.satsignal.net
E-mail:    davidtaylor@writeme.com
2002 Feb 23
