Good news first. Development on WinDirStat has officially resumed.
Now the question. I know as a matter of fact that there is demand for a 64bit version of WinDirStat. However, since 64bit implies Unicode, there is no need to handle this specifically as long as the compatibility requirements ar Windows 2000 and above. Nevertheless, as you know we actually do have an ANSI version. My proposal would be the following:
- I’ll try to keep compatibility as much as possible, even for Windows 9x/ME.
- Emphasis will be put on Windows 2000 and above - meaning it will be native Unicode.
- The versions offered will stretch 32bit (x86) and 64bit (x64) with Unicode. ANSI may be made available separately.
- New features will only be available in the Unicode versions, but bugs will be fixed in the old one and selected features may be migrated back.
I’ll add a poll soon at this place (possibly as a new post, so people who subscribe to the RSS feed get to see it).
// Oliver
PS: Feel free to comment on this post.
Please add support to not show duplicate hardlinks. On Vista+ systems, the space displayed is primarily doubled due to hardlinks against the “actual” file contents under %windir%\winsxs. A toggle to show/hide these types of duplicate files would be great. Thanks.
Well, which one should be shown and which not? That’s the trouble with hardlinks: there is no only legit “base”-link.
For the most part tho, the file under \winsxs is the “real” file on Vista. Toggling to hide hardlinks then would hide hardlinks not under that path.
So you suggest hiding everything outside that place? What about MKLINK and other tools which I like to use to create hardlinks (e.g. DFHL)? Those hardlinks will be hidden as well.
I think you certainly have a point here, but they shouldn’t be hidden either way. Instead WDS should handle this properly. So I’ll work on this. There is another problem on 64bit, btw, which prevents it from seeing the “redirected” files (such as those under system32), causing wrong results on any Win64.
You could do a fileid lookup, those that are under winsxs with a linkcount > 1 could have other links hidden.
If only they’d hardlinked the “real” copy and junctioned the others it would be a bit easier. AV/backup apps would’ve hit issues tho…
Great app - glad to see you’re continuing to refine it. Thx much.
I don’t see the point of a x64 release, there are api’s to allow 32bit apps to see an unvirtulised view of the filesystem.
A 64bit build seems an unnecessary complication for both you and the potential downloader.
Oh and awesome app btw!
Looking forward to see how you deal with the hardlink problem.
Good point, it might be additional hassle indeed. But I’ll decide after actually checking the performance differences. I can imagine that particular operations would be faster natively.
Oh if it’s faster, I’m all for it!
(need an excuse to load a 64-bit on this box anyway… :P)
It would also be great to be able to save out reports. Right now I end up taking a screen cap of as much of the window as I can.
Is anyone still reading this ?
64 bit is worthwhile. New machines are being sold and supported exclusively on 64 bit Vista (e.g. Dell Studio XPS with Core i7). There are issues with 32 bit apps accessing low level information - besides, performance is impared with 32 bit applications…
Yes, someone is still reading it
The point is, though, that currently we have 2 different “editions”. One with full Unicode capabilities and one with ANSI only. ANSI is also always slower, because all the ANSI APIs on Windows NT and later convert the string to Unicode anyway (well, as much as a mapping is possible). 64bit and ANSI is pointless. But should we drop ANSI ultimately (not necessarily the option to get back to it, but cease to develop that branch, so to speak - or should we continue ANSI + Unicode 32bit + Unicode 64bit.
BTW: The performance impact on WOW64 programs is minimal. Has to do with how the stuff is passed to the kernel. And depending on what you consider low-level, I cannot really see what information is hidden from WDS that would be interesting for this kind of application
Yes please.
This would be nice to have support for x64 Vista and the new Win 7.
Thanks.
WDS runs on Windows 7 and on Vista as well as on x64 Windows versions. It just doesn’t support some obscure new features and in case of x64 Windows it runs in WOW64 mode (whose performance is nearly the same as for native x64 applications).
But the plan now is to drop 9x versions (i.e. ANSI versions) and concentrate on Unicode and NT versions with x86 or x64 processor. Itanium is not planned (specifically because I have no way of checking it!).
It would be great to have a 64bit version of WinDirStat.
We occasionally would like to run it against a very very large file system and the current 32bit one crashes (guessing it runs out of memory)…