iBook G3 HD lying about free space. what to do?

I would recommend repairing permissions, and repairing the disk - all through Disk Utility.

If that doesn't work, I would sit down your friend and his iBook and have a serious talk about why lying is wrong, and how sometimes ever though he sees the bigger computers with their bigger hard drives lying (my 120GB is really 111.8!) it still isn't right, and if they jumped of a cliff or started running Windows, would he? Yeah, that's right, you bet your ass he wouldn't!

Past that, I really don't know.

What size are the fluctuations? It might be Virtual RAM or alternatively, it could be P2P app(s) which sometimes claim to take up the full space of a download before it is actually downloaded.

I think you need some sort of hack to get into virtual RAM settings in OSX, don't you? I know it's not as easy as OS 9...

Here's a short article from MacFixit to get you started, sound like exactly your friend's problem:

http://www.macfixit.com/staticpages/index.php?page=20031110093132207

My advice? Downgrade to OSX 10.2. I run 10.2 on my G3 ibook 700 because it only has 384 RAM, and it runs quite well...

Before going much further I think it's important to be certain we know what we're dealing with. Virtual RAM is just a guess. How much space does it chew through? How much space does he have free when he first starts up?

livingfortoday said:

...and how sometimes ever though he sees the bigger computers with their bigger hard drives lying (my 120GB is really 111.8!) it still isn't right...

Click to expand...

That's because Apple do not know what a Mega Byte is and they get their numbers all mixed up. It's OS X which is wrong. You still have all the 120GB though.

Just to explain:

8 bits to the byte
1000 bytes to the kB
1000kB to the MB
1000MB to the GB

8 bits to the byte
1024 bytes to the kiB (kibi-bytes)
1024kiB to the MiB (mebi-bytes)
1024MiB to the GiB (gibi-bytes)

Apple need to catch up with standards, they changed 7 years ago to avoid confusion. These are all SI, IEC, IEEE and CIPM standards.

It's not just Apple, Microsoft does the same.

howesey said:

That's because Apple do not know what a Mega Byte is and they get their numbers all mixed up. It's OS X which is wrong. You still have all the 120GB though.

Click to expand...

All other mainstream OSs do the same as OSX. Personally I've always thought the harddrive manufacturers should change their measurement to match those used since the dawn of (Unix) time.

is it not the swap files
I have a 3GB ibook 300mhz & it dose the same, It will start with about 800mb free then this will reduce until it runs out of space, if i then log out & in or restart it will recover the space,

A sound plan, though why someone wouldn't want to drop to 10.2 is beyond me. It's pretty much the same as 10.3 and takes up less space...

But yeah. More RAM and/or a larger HD, both of which are pretty cheap these days...

More RAM is a good idea however for a free solution, your friend can either keep less apps open at the same time or free up some hard drive space (somehow). I really think it's just the Virtual RAM building up which is nothing to worry about (perfectly normal) but mildly annoying if there's limited free space.