Memory full/what next?

[nadik]

Greetings all!
Newbie here to the Mac world. Have a Macbook 13" w/57 g memory. Have used up most (500mb left) storing photos etc. What's my next move as far as safeguarding what I have etc.? Do I purchase an external hard drive, if so which is best? Sorry I'm such a neophyte but we all start somewhere and I appreciate your help. Cheers!

 

[eluk]

Try searching for external drives. There are dozens of threads.

 

[eman]

You mean your hard drive is almost full. Put in a larger 2.5" SATA hard drive.

 

[Consultant]

What you are calling memory is actually the harddrive. Use the correct term next time. Storage is measured in MB and GB, not "g".

You also need to keep to keep at least 10GB on you harddrive free on modern operating systems. So buy an external drive. There are tens of thousands of threads here on that.

Computer Memory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_Access_Memory

Computer Harddrive, storage, HD
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive

 

[nadik]

memory

Gee, thanks for making me feel like an idiot! Now I know that I need to research every single term I use when posting a question. Hope my "g" did not upset you too much. Merry Christmas.

 

[gnasher729]

Gee, thanks for making me feel like an idiot! Now I know that I need to research every single term I use when posting a question. Hope my "g" did not upset you too much. Merry Christmas.

I think Consultant wasn't upset about this at all. There are many situations where we need to know something _exactly_ to be able to give the right answer. In this situation we could guess, in other cases that might not be possible. "g" is the unit for acceleration. 57 g would be about the deceleration that you get when you throw the MacBook against a hard wall at the time when it hits. 57 GB would be 57 Gigabyte. When someone says they have 57 Gb then they either have 57 Gigabit (which is one eighth of 57 Gigabyte), or they wrote Gb when they meant GB.

Don't take corrections like this as an attempt to make you feel stupid, but as an attempt to improve your knowledge and the general quality of threads.

Anyway: The easiest solution for your problem is an external hard drive. You should look for a 2.5 inch hard drive, it should have a USB connector (that makes it compatible with about any computer in the world); an additional FireWire connector would make it faster connected to your MacBook (but costs extra). A size of 250 GB or 320 GB is probably best value for money; they cost not much more than a smaller hard drive.

The best solution would be replacing the internal hard drive with a bigger one, so you don't need to carry an extra drive. You need someone who is confident about opening a laptop, but with a MacBook it is not difficult at all (with an old MacBook Pro it is one hell of an operation and only suitable for someone really experienced doing that kind of thing). You don't have to do that now; if you buy an external drive today you can take the drive out of its case and swap it with the internal drive at any time in the future.

 

[n8mac]

Welcome to Mac-rumors nadik. I am sorry that your first question was responded to with rudeness and arrogance. Normally Mac-rumors is a friendly place to ask questions. Even though your question wasn't exact to the letter, I knew exactly what you were asking. Enjoy your Mac.