I wrote A.S.H. to allow you to control your disk space usage by
discovering files that are duplicated and, should you so wish, deleting
one or more of these duplicates.

A.S.H. offer also a visual directory explorer, that is a graphical pie
representation of your drives and directories and other interesting
statistical charts.

There are many ways in which duplicate files can be deposited on your
hard disk, for example programs which don't check to see if you have a
particular DLL installed and install their own private copy in any case,
or other programs that install a DLL in your \Windows directory when it is
already in \Windows\System.

Internet is another great duplicates producer, because of the cache directories
and also because all of us collect graphical, text and zip files around.

A.S.H. scans your drives to find duplicate files.
First it scans all the directories and collects information about all the
files it finds, than it sorts the file list into size order and checks for
duplicate.

To ensure files are really duplicate A.S.H. uses a CRC32 algorithm over the
whole file. This process can take some time, especially for the first
(and longest files) of the list, but in such a way you can be sure only
really duplicate files are reported to be so.

A.S.H. makes also a file name comparison and creates a list of same name files,
so you can check if there are different version of the same DLL or file.

A.S.H. provides also other useful information and hints, as:

	list of directories where you have many little files over big drives;
	list of totally duplicated directories;
	list of zero size files;
	list of temporary files;
        list of not used files and directories;
        list of broken windows links;

You have the possibility to delete files from A.S.H. itself (to Recycle bin),
but be warned, you take sole responsibility if you choose to delete a file
because A.S.H. makes no attempt to check if the file is in use or key to the
functioning of your computer.

You can also archive file in the special ASH Tray and delete it later when 
you are sure.

Generally:
	if you aren't sure, then never delete a file; leave it alone.
	if you are positive you know it's all right to delete it, then still don’t,
	just archive or rename it for a short period.

A.S.H. is a very powerful and easy to use utility, but like most powerful
utility, it allows you to make lots of damage, so use it carefully.

Even if you don’t use A.S.H. to delete duplicate files, you can take advantage
from it using the visual space explorer or the other features
(i.e. you can use A.S.H. to plan your partition size before to migrate on a
 new hard disk and more....).

Please report me about installation problems or bug:

Mario Pacchiarotti
Support & Development, Jimjams
mailto: mario@jimjams.com
web: http://www.jimjams.com

