trouble making free space on hard disk

[flunn@sympatico]

I am using an iBook, PowerBook 4,1 with 640 MB RAM. I am running on OS 10.4.9.

My hard disk is full to capacity (only about 700 MB available on a 9.4 GB disk).

I find that when I remove files to make more space even though I don't put on anything more of any great size, the percentage of free space rapidly diminishes and I start getting "Your startup volume is almost full" notices — and having problems of various kinds.

Now I don't know what to do to get more free space on my disk. (I have trashed or archived all the files and applications I don't need, but the problem remains.)

It seems to me that either there is a large amount of space being taken up by something I don't know about, don't need, and can't find; or else the disk somehow "thinks" there is more data on it than in fact there is.

Any help solving this problem would be much appreciated..

(Incidentally I've used OnyX to clean the disk but this hasn't helped either. )

regards from

flunn

 

[bartelby]

Have you used Monolingual to strip out unused languages?

If you have a CD burner find your oldest docs and archive to cd the trash them from the hd.

 

[faintember]

Monolingual is a good start, but won't VM just eat up the free space again? I normally eat up 5-8GB of VM. I just don't think you can really do anything running OS X on a 9GB HD.

 

[bartelby]

Monolingual is a good start, but won't VM just eat up the free space again? I normally eat up 5-8GB of VM. I just don't think you can really do anything running OS X on a 9GB HD.

I have OS X running on a PowerBook G3 with a 6GB HD, it is Jaguar though.

 

[faintember]

I have OS X running on a PowerBook G3 with a 6GB HD, it is Jaguar though.

Wow...and I am proven wrong!

Oh, you can try OmniDiskSweeper or WhatSize to check for any large files that may be hiding. Just make sure you don't need a file before you delete it (i.e. don't delete your VM file).