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bennetsaysargh

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Jan 20, 2003
2,367
1
New York
my whole computer is bugging out and i have no idea what to do. i have a 400Mhz G3 slot loading iMac. combo drive.

wel, one of the small problems is when i go into some applications, it has the colorful buttons, and in others, the grey. i like the grey.

my hard drive just filled up overnight. iTunes won't save the library because the disk is full. last night (1 am today) i had 6.6GB left. now, without ownloading anything at all, i have 101MB left.

safari was also bugging out a bit and kept on quitting. that stopped a few minutes ago. now it won't save the bookmarks and i can't make any new ones.

please help me!!!!!
 

Rower_CPU

Moderator emeritus
Oct 5, 2001
11,219
2
San Diego, CA
First off, have you tried restarting yet?

After restarting, see if the hard drive is still full. If it is, get info on these folders to see where all the space is being used:
- Home directory
- System directory
- Library directory

If any of them, I would suspect your Home folder. Go through the various folders in there to see where the culprit is.
 

yzedf

macrumors 65816
Nov 1, 2002
1,161
0
Connecticut
Sounds like you are running OS X and Classic programs together. You are probably out of room on one of the partitions (OS 9 side, or the OS X side).

If this is the case, and you don't like OS X (based on your color buttons statement), than format the hard drive and reinstall OS 9 only.
 

vollspacken

macrumors 65816
Oct 17, 2002
1,130
0
Boogie-Down Berlintown
do you use Virtual PC?

VPC dynamically increases the size of the Windows-HD image.

this could be the case if you had VPC running last night and downloaded huge files (divx movies, software, tons of MP3s...)

vSpacken
 

King Cobra

macrumors 603
Mar 2, 2002
5,403
0
If you constantly have low Hard Drive space (i.e.: less than the amount of RAM your machine has) free up your machine FAST!

I noticed similar problems with my iBook when I was working with Photoshop. One particular image took away about 1GB of my Hard Drive and used up my RAM. I was down to about 130MB, and my iBook has 320MB of RAM. I received errors in Photoshop about not being able to complete certain tasks because the scratch disks were full. I cleared up my iBook by an extra couple of hundred MB and it was fine until I ran out of HD space again. After I cleared away a few GB of data I was fine again.

I would also follow the previous suggestions.
 

idea_hamster

macrumors 65816
Jul 11, 2003
1,096
1
NYC, or thereabouts
Man, if I didn't know better, I'd say it sounds like that Migmaf virus that hijacks PC's to act as storage and server nodes for, well, unsavory content.

Do you have cable/ethernet internet access?

Not that it really matters, since sources concur that Migmaf is a Windows virus only.
 

bennetsaysargh

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Jan 20, 2003
2,367
1
New York
im not running virtual PC. im not using os 9 apps at all. restarting fixed the hard drive problem, but i logged in, and there are the fruity buttons and my dock was reset along with my safari preferences and iChat preferences. probably also other apple apps too, but i dont know.

my uncle just reminded me about norton. i forgot it all this time. im gonna go and run it.

thanks for all your help you guys:D i really appreciate it.:D
 

Gus

macrumors 65816
Jan 1, 2002
1,078
0
Minnesota
It's a long shot, but the 400 iMac is a few years old now. Maybe, and your prefernces being reset make me guess this, your PRAM battery is dying. They are fairly cheap, but you'll have to pop open the iMac to install it.

Regards,
Gus
 

Daveman Deluxe

macrumors 68000
Jun 17, 2003
1,555
1
Corvallis, Oregon
I suspect one of two (or both) things are happening here:

-You may have a corrupted plist file. To verify this, make a new user and log in as that user. If everything seems to work just fine, it is almost certainly a corrupted plist file. Check out your preferences folder (home->Library->Preferences) and delete all of the files.
-Your PRAM battery, as mentioned before, may be dead.

I recommend checking the plist files first because the only cost is a few minutes of your time to re-set all of your preferences once their preferences files are deleted.
 

bennetsaysargh

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Jan 20, 2003
2,367
1
New York
i logged in as a new user, and it's still slow. i don't remember it being this sluggish. is it time for a new computer?

i also have another problem. i ercently imported a couple CDs onto my uncle's pismo, and put them onto my iPod's FW disc mode. now, in any finder, jaguar or panther, i can't put them onto the iMac, or even listen to them. the whole sysytem freezes when i do this.
are the files corrupt?
 
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