Disk Recon 4.2

Disk Recon is a great tool for examining and cleaning up your hard disk. It allows you to find duplicate files, to examine disk usage, and you can even use it to monitor certain files or directories continuously. Other neat features include batch renaming and batch attribute assignment. It shows previews of your image files, allowing you to decide which ones to keep. Currently, the program can only preview images which use the BMP, JPG, GIF, PDF or ICO formats.

This application's user interface is pretty complex. A tabbed panel is used, allowing you to select which feature you want to use. In my opinion, this is one of the best ways to organize many features into a single window. However, I don't really like the stop-search button. It resembles the power off button that you have in your Windows Start menu, so at first I was a bit reluctant to click it. I just wanted to stop the search, not to close the entire application.

Among the more advanced features I would like to mention the RegEx search capability, and the shell integration. You can right click any folder on your hard disk to open it using the application.

Pluses: The program supports exporting the search results into XLS, HTML, CSV, XML, or text format. You can use this feature to create a list of files from a certain folder. Another plus for this application comes from the fact that it can generate pie charts which depict the disk usage of each folder.

Drawbacks / flaws: I clicked the "File Browser" tab and I navigated into a sub-folder. I got stuck there because there is no way of going back to the parent folder.

In conclusion: Disk Recon is worth a try. Overall, I was satisfied with its features.

version reviewed: 3.3