My preferred solution is WinDirStat (WinDirStat.info installer). You may specify a hard drive, local folder, or remote folder. It can take a while to fully analyze a drive. In the meantime, you can see what it figured out so far. Once it fully analyzes whatever it is looking at, it will use up some of the lower part of the window, drawing what it calls a "treemap". There, you can often visually see large files instantly. Also, in the upper-right corner, it will show extensions, sorted by what uses the most space. Those are the neatest aspects of the program. Being able to delete files, launch explorer windows, and sending E-Mail reports are some other features.
In the future, if you ever dabble with Unix, there is a similar program called KDirStat with most of the same features. (In fact, WinDirStat was designed to act like KDirStat.)
That is the best solution I've encountered. If you don't have enough space to install even a small program like that, you can right-click a folder in Windows Explorer, and choose properties, to find out the size of the individual folder.