Fluctuating Hard Drive Space

[airwalke]

Hi all,

I'm aware of the virtual memory OS X uses, but this case was extremely strange. I usually keep 10gb free on my hard drive for performance reasons, but today a message popped up saying that I was running out of room while I was downloading whatever I was downloading. I checked to see how much I had left, and was surprised to find 650 mb left.

After coming back later, my hard drive space was right back where it was at 10 gb. Even if this is virtual memory usage, isn't this a little excessive?

 

[madfresh]

yeah, i'd say it is a little excessive. Did you have a lot of apps open? Maybe you should upgrade your RAM and keep a little more space on your HDD free.

 

[airwalke]

I don't normally have a lot of applications open, but this week I've been running World of WarCraft in windowed mode, Safari, iChat and Mail. I first noticed the problem before I started up the game, and noticed it went back to 10gb after I had been playing for awhile.

Part two, although I'm not sure if it's related, happened this afternoon. I had WoW open again while on iChat, and the screen completely froze, and the sound from the game was caught on a loop, as well as a loud buzzing sound emanating from the speakers or the computer (I'm not sure which.)

I've got a 1.67 GHz Powerbook G4 with 1 gb of RAM, so memory isn't usually a problem. My computer has had a history of a few logic board replacements, the most recent being in May... although if this is again a problem with the logic board, the computer is now out of warranty and will not be fixed unless I'm ready for a $600 repair bill.

 

[Neil321]

Try Disk Inventory X to see what's eating up your HDD's space, but maybe you should think about a larger replacement as only leaving the bare min of space will only slow things down