09-04-2009, 06:58 AM

Hi

Please forgive me if this post isnt in the right place, I'm a newbie and struggling.

My macbook is 3 years old now, I'm running 10.4 and started with 60Gb of the hard drive. I've had a look and I have 7Gb left free and hardly any of that space is taken up by pics and itunes (<20Gb in total).

So I'm wondering what is normal, before I go spend some money on a new hard drive? I often get the beachball of death which stays forever and was wondering if the two are linked?

I downloaded and ran OmniDisk, which highlighted music and pics as the two biggest files but there was nothing else anywhere near that size.

The speed of my mac is getting really really slow, so is it time now to spend some cash and get a new hard drive or do I have another problem elsewhere? I only really use it for web access, music, email and watching films. So there are no other apps installed, except Firefox, other than the basics I got when I bought it.

I also thought switching off Filevaut might help (the MacB seems to run really slow when it restarts after this has been done) but I got a message saying its not possible to switch it off as it needs 4092 Gb to do this???? Is this right?

Any suggestions would be really really helpful.

Thanks!
K

09-04-2009, 06:35 PM

G'day and welcome to the forums.

Kirsty for a hard drive to work anywhere near efficiently, it requires about 15-20% free space and as you have advised, you are way under that limit and the beach ball or 'spinning pizza of death' is a sign of that as well as the slowness of the machine.

By today's standard, your drive is way too small as you use it for photos and iTunes.

Best suggestion is to get say a 250GB drive installed, install Tiger on that and then place your current drive in an external case and transfer all your OS and files via SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner.

For regular maintenance and to keep the machine nice and fast, use Onyx or MainMenu for all those cleaning tasks. Also more memory may assist as yoiu have not provided RAM details.

09-05-2009, 02:42 PM

Originally Posted by harryb2448

G'day and welcome to the forums.

Kirsty for a hard drive to work anywhere near efficiently, it requires about 15-20% free space and as you have advised, you are way under that limit and the beach ball or 'spinning pizza of death' is a sign of that as well as the slowness of the machine.

By today's standard, your drive is way too small as you use it for photos and iTunes.

Best suggestion is to get say a 250GB drive installed, install Tiger on that and then place your current drive in an external case and transfer all your OS and files via SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner.

For regular maintenance and to keep the machine nice and fast, use Onyx or MainMenu for all those cleaning tasks. Also more memory may assist as yoiu have not provided RAM details.

Hi

Thanks for your reply, I just wanted to check I wasnt doing anything stupid before I went out and spent any money and not solved the problem.

Time to give in and do it!

09-05-2009, 03:28 PM

Good luck there... you know, there is something about buying new hardware, and breathing some new life into a mac.