WASTE.EXE                              Joseph T. Glosz Jr  (CIS  72633,1646)

Waste does just one thing: it tells you just how much total "wasted"
or slack space there is on a specified drive.

Slack space is the difference between the filesize that DOS's DIR command
tells you and the actual physical space taken by the file.

"Huh?" you may ask? Or, "why do I care?" might be another one of your
questions.

First, let's point out that DOS cannot allocate anything smaller than
a "cluster" to any file. Sometimes this cluster is called an
"allocation unit."

So how big is a cluster? Well, that depends entirely on how the size
of your hard disk and how you've partitioned it. Here is a table
relating the volume size of a disk (or partition) to the cluster size:

    VOLUME SIZE          SECTORS/CLUSTER   CLUSTER SIZE
    ------------------   ---------------   ------------
    16 MB to 127 MB             4              2048
    128 MB to 255 MB            8              4096
    256 MB to 511 MB           16              8192
    512 MB to 1023 MB          32             16384
    1 GB to 2047 MB            64             32768


This leads us into the "why do I care" part. You care because every
single file on your disk will take a whole number of clusters.  That
little one line batch file you wrote that DOS reports as having a size
of 62 bytes?  Well, it REALLY takes up 8192 bytes (8K) of your 340 MB
drive.  This is over 8100 bytes of completed wasted space.  Space that
can't be used by anything thing else on your drive.

So with a cluster size of 8K, every file on your disk will waste from
zero to 8191 bytes of space.  But with a cluster size of 4K, each file
will waste no more than HALF of that. And with a cluster size of 2K,
each file will waste no more than 2047 bytes!

So, with this simple utility, you can intelligently decide how best to
partition your large hard drive.  If you have LOTS of files, and
especially if they are little, you will waste an enormous amount of
space. And WASTE will tell you exactly how much. You no longer have to
guess.

To Run WASTE just type WASTE at the DOS prompt.  It will analyze the
default drive. Or type WASTE D:  for example, to have it analyze drive
D.  WASTE will also analyze floppy disks.

Examples:

      WASTE           analyzes default drive
      WASTE C:        analyzes drive C
      WASTE A:        analyzes drive A
      WASTE /h        help & credit screen

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This utility is free. Enjoy it, and let's reduce our waste out there!

J GLOSZ     (CIS 72633,1646)