Macbook Pro really slow. Disk utility confusion!!

[pstrauss]

Hello,

I just got my first Mac about a month ago after a lifetime of Windows.

I have a few questions/problems. First off, starting this morning, my Macbook Pro has been noticabely slower. I have the 2.4 GHz Intel 2 GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRam. The model that was most recently released, baseline.

Everything has been sluggish recently, even with few programs open.

So, I thought that I'd try and get the thing moving a little quicker. I opened up disk utility and thought that the option "Erase Free Space" would erase those little backup files that get left behind after you delete something from the trash, giving me more space on my harddrive and hopefully let the thing run faster.

Amazing, I come back to my computer and see that the remaining disk space has gone from about 80GB to 65!!!! Fantastic, less space!

So my first question being how do I reverse that and get my space back, and where the hell did it go????

Second. How do I free up space and make my harddrive a little bit faster, and why is it sluggish right now? Pretty frustrating just because I'm so used to a Windows system where I could fix this in a second.

Thanks.

 

[EricNau]

By erasing the free space you're simply overwriting any deleted files with random data so it cannot be recovered.

This comes directly from an Apple support article: "You might see a message that says you are running out of disk space, but you can ignore that warning. When this operation is complete, you will have the same amount of free space as you did when it started."

Did you let the process complete, or did you stop it early? According to this article, it may be as easy as deleting a file from the trash to get your storage space back.


As for your other problem, have you tried repairing permissions?

 

[pstrauss]

I repaired permissions with the trial of Cocktail I downloaded, didn't give me any space back.

Neither did emptying the trash. So now I have about 15GB of space that I have no idea where it is or what it is for that matter...

And yes I let it complete, I used the second option 7x or whatever. Took hours so I left and came back, unfortuantely it did the EXACT opposite of what I hoped it would do. I'm just confused at the purpose of the clear free space function, who would benefit from what it does?

So which option is it in the disk utilities that looks over your harddrive and makes it run a little quicker?

 

[EricNau]

I repaired permissions with the trial of Cocktail I downloaded, didn't give me any space back.

Neither did emptying the trash. So now I have about 15GB of space that I have no idea where it is or what it is for that matter...

Have you tried repairing permissions from Disk Utility?

You can use an application like omnidisksweeper to locate big files and folders. If you lost 15 GB of data it should be fairly easy to locate.

And yes I let it complete, I used the second option 7x or whatever. Took hours so I left and came back, unfortuantely it did the EXACT opposite of what I hoped it would do. I'm just confused at the purpose of the clear free space function, who would benefit from what it does?

Like it said before, the Erase Free Space function is designed for those who wish for their deleted files to be unrecoverable. (When you empty files from the trash, they aren't deleted immediately; rather, they're simply marked for deletion and overwritten when the space is needed.)

So which option is it in the disk utilities that looks over your harddrive and makes it run a little quicker?

Usually, it's the repair permissions function. OS X doesn't fragment in the same way Windows does, thus there isn't an option for disk defragmentation.

 

[pstrauss]

Ok thanks, I did the repair permissions and it worked for me.

Thanks again