It's not uncommon for some folders on your PC to grow to an uncontrollable size. For example, if you have a directory/folder in which you keep your favourite songs or photos, it won't be long before there's hundreds or thousands of files in there. Which can make backups tricky, and also causes problems if you want to copy everything to a relatively low-capacity device such as a USB stick or a CD-R disc.

Folder Axe is a free utility that can help. You can get it from http://bkprograms.weebly.com/folder-axe.html. It's free, and should run on all recent versions of Windows. The download is less than 1 MB, though you'll also need to ensure that you have the Microsoft .NET Framework v4 installed.

Folder Axe is easy to use. Start by choosing the folder you want to split. Then use the tabs to choose a method for splitting and, within the tab you choose, select the relevant options. In the screen shot below, I've chosen to split by size.

Because the program moves your files to the new folder structure, rather than copying them, it's incredibly fast. It'll only take a second or 2 to run.

One point to note. By default, the new folder structure is written to the same place as the original one. So if you originally have a folder with 1000 files, and you opt to split it into 4 sets of 250 files, your original folder that contained the 1000 files will now contain no files at all, but simply 4 sub-folders called 1, 2, 3 and 4. If you want to keep a copy of the original layout too, choose a different destination. But this will mean that the program has to copy rather than move, so the operation will be slower.

I've checked the Folder Axe installer file with Virus Total and it appears to be totally free of viruses and malware.