Low on Hard Disk Space!!!!

[baldie2u]

HI My daughter is at University over in the UK with her Mac Mini (Intel) running Tiger. She has sent me a SOS message saying it is running awfully slow and she gets the above warning!

I am fairly certain her HD is not full from the way she uses it, but before I start investigating I was wondering if this is a known issue and for instance can be corrected by e.g. a simple repair of permissions with the standard Disk utility (she is running panther by the way).

If anyone has any ideas I would be grateful of advice and the best way to achieve correction (I am not brilliant when it comes to computers - or most things! - so I would appreciate simple instructions, especially as I will be doing it with her over the phone!).

 

[novicew]

You can use Disk Inventory X to see which files and folders occupy the HDD space. Its however important not to touch any system files if you decided to move some of the big once to an external HDD.

Slowing down happens when the swap partition cannot occupy the required space in the HDD. It is basically a space dynamically allocated by the OS when the RAM is not sufficient. Its usually around 5~15GB. You have to make sure this amount of space is free before it operates at normal speed.

 

[rcltrh]

has she been doing anything with iMovie? iMovie can fill up an entire hard drive during the project building phase of a single simple movie made up of several pictures and clips. If she had a couple movies in the making those could be whats doing it. I tried to make a single movie using about 500 still pictures and totally ran out of drive space where the computer wouldnt even run. After I got to looking, the project file was like 50GB in size. Crazy.