(Credit: TinyHacker)

At purchase, you probably thought your 250GB hard drive would suffice, but heavy use and months later, you get a "low disk space" alert.

Unfortunately, it's much easier to fill up your hard drive than it is to clean it. With so many folders and directories, how do you pinpoint what's taking up space?

WinDirStat, a freeware program for Windows, helps you do just that.

The program scans your hard drives and shows you a detailed summary of what's taking up space on your disk in the form of a colorful graphic. Each file type (MP3, ZIP, EXE, JPEG, etc.) is assigned a color in a collage of squares that are large or small, depending on how much space that file type is using.

Once you pinpoint the storage hogs, WinDirStat allows you to permanently delete the files from within the app.

Follow the slideshow or the written instructions below to get started with WinDirStat.

Clean up your Windows hard drive (screenshots)

1. Download and install WinDirStat. Go with the recommended installation.

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Adobe Systems issued a release candidate for Flash Player 11 yesterday, an update that brings major new features to its widely used but competitively threatened browser plug-in.

Flash brings cross-platform advantages to programmers, letting them write software without having to worry so much about browser compatibility matters. But a wide variety of new Web standards--some now developed with Adobe help--are injecting new life into a plug-in-free version of the Web. At the same time, Flash is banned outright from iOS devices and only has a small foothold on Android devices.

Adobe is working to keep Flash relevant, though, in part by heading for the high end. As Web standards take on formatting, layout, animation, and some audio and video tasks, Adobe is aiming Flash primarily at gaming, high-end video, and in-house company applications.

Thus, a number of new features are coming to Flash 11, which is available for download on Adobe Labs. Among them:

• A 64-bit design. Browsers increasingly are 64-bit software, letting them take advantage of more memory and some extra processor features, but it's difficult to use 32-bit plug-ins in 64-bit browsers. The lack of 64-bit plug-ins is one reason people are increasingly browsing the Web without plug-ins, Microsoft b... [Read more]

Readers will see a landing page that looks like this when they launch the free DC Comics iPad app.

Comic books--or at least, the superhero comics that have been a mainstay of American youth culture for 70 years--have been in a crisis. Comics sales were plummeting, direct market brick-and-mortar comic book shops that are essentially the only outlet to purchase the monthly issues of said comics were closing under the recessive economy, and the industry was in desperate need of new readers. With its new day-and-date digital initiative and line-wide reboot, DC Comics might've provided just that.

Or they might've killed it outright. It's hard to tell, on the first full day of their relaunch. Thirteen new titles launched today, and by the end of September the company will have published 52 new No. 1s. DC is calling this push the "New 52."

Mr. Terrific, page 1. Shared with CNET exclusively from DC Comics. (Click to see full size.)

Last week, DC Comics published only two titles: Flashpoint no. 5, the last of the old line of comics, and Justice League no. 1, the first of the new. Justice League was also published at the same time in print as digitally, known in the comics bu... [Read more]

I like Chrome quite a bit, but I know others who swear by the latest Firefox, Opera, or IE browsers. Chrome lets you transfer browsing data easily, but it can get frustrating to share information like passwords, bookmarks, and so on using different browsers. FavBackup is a great, free Windows utility that lets you transfer data painlessly using many popular browsers. Here's how to use it: 

1. Download, install and run FavBackup. (The download page also lists supported browsers, so you may want to check that out first.) 
2. Select your browser from the icons presented at the top, then choose which settings to save. You should also select a backup location (somewhere in the cloud, like a Dropbox folder, could make life much easier for you).

   Step 2: Select data to back up.

3. When you want to restore settings, install FavBackup on a second computer or account, then click the Restore tab, select the appropriate browser and backup location, then follow through with the wizard. It's easy, but your old data will be overwritten permanently, so if you want to back that up, take care of that first. 

It's that simple. This too should make it even easier to move to a new computer or to switch between work and home more easily.

Symantec's Norton updates for 2012 launched today with the expected slate of performance improvements and interesting ancillary features and with a hint of a much stronger connection between the company's desktop and mobile offerings. The robust Norton Internet Security 2012 (download) and slimmer Norton AntiVirus 2012 (download) introduce several new features and reasonable but not amazing performance bumps.

Norton Internet Security 2012

There's now a link at the bottom of the main interface to Norton's mobile version. Next to it is a link for Norton Management, a new tool which opens in your default Web browser that allows you to use Norton remotely. This includes monitoring security status, remote add and installation, and license key renewal. However, given the growth of the mobile market, it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect a stronger connection between the two in the coming year.

One of the better new features is a change to Download Insight. This community-driven tool originally evaluated files being downloaded for security, but now it looks at their stability among other Norton users, too. There's also metered bandwidth options for people on rate-limited connections, and several interface tweaks to make the program easier on... [Read more]